Strengthening regional and national capacities to develop cultural and creative industries in Asia and Pacific

The UNESCO Korean Funds-in-Trust (KFIT) was established in 2007 to support the development of cultural and creative industries (CCI) in developing countries. UNESCO has since implemented a series of KFIT projects to strengthen CCI in a number of developing countries. Implementation of the KFIT projects at the country level over the last 10 years made it apparent that there is a lack of experts from the Asia and Pacific region who are knowledgeable about the 2005 Convention and who are able to provide technical assistance support to developing countries in line with UNESCO’s participatory approach involving civil society. This lack of expert network in the region may be both cause and effect of the low rate of ratification of the 2005 Convention among the countries in Asia/Pacific. Out of 44 Member States of UNESCO in the Asian-Pacific region (Group IV), only 14 States have ratified the 2005 Convention so far, making it the least represented region.

Against this background, this project has three inter-linked components. Through Component 1, UNESCO plans to train a group of specialists[1] from Asia and Pacific on the 2005 Convention, its guiding principles and UNESCO’s capacity-building strategy and methodology. UNESCO culture programme specialists from UNESCO Field offices based in Asia-Pacific will also participate in the training. This training session is expected to establish a network of experts in the region who can provide constant technical assistance and capacity building support for the promotion and the implementation of the 2005 Convention in the Asia and Pacific region. Component 2 aims at empowering selected creative entrepreneurs as a motor of developing the cultural and creative industries (CCI) in Pakistan and raising general awareness of the CCI for sustainable development, while Component 3 aims to develop and promote visual arts industry, especially photography, in Bangladesh. It is expected that to the extent possible, the implementation of both Components 2 and 3 would involve those specialists trained from Component 1, so that the trained specialists would put theory into practice by being concretely involved in the KFIT project implementation in Pakistan and Bangladesh

[1] The training participants would be specialists on the issues covered by the 2005 Convention, such as cultural policy, media diversity, culture in digital environment, arts and civil society, mobility of artists, flow of cultural goods and services, culture in trade agreements, inclusion of culture in national development, international development, gender and arts, and artistic freedom, etc..