Have you ever noticed that everything around us is a product of creative minds, thinking differently, challenging the norm, taking risks and learning from trial and error? Or we can say that everything that we do is nothing but a “creative art”.
It is in this regard that the United Nations celebrates its 4th annual World Creativity and Innovation Day today, 21st April, 2021. The celebration was first observed on the 21st of April 2018; hence, today marks the fourth commemoration.
The main objective of celebrating the day is to encourage individuals and nations of the world to use new ideas, make new decisions, and apply creative thinking at solving the myriads of problems facing our society today.
According to the joint Creative Economy Report- Widening Local Development Pathways, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)- describes “Creativity and innovations as the true wealth of nations”, both at individual and group levels. The report confirms the creative economy as one of the most rapidly growing sectors of the world economy, and considers it a non-monetary, value-generating force that contributes significantly to the achievement of an inclusive and people-centred sustainable development.
The report also emphasised the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI) as among the most dynamic sectors in the world economy, generating $2.25 billion in revenue and 29.5 million jobs worldwide. In that spirit, countries are enjoined to harness the potential of the CCI for economic sustainability and poverty alleviation.
The need for creativity and innovation requires no further emphasis especially with the daunting, interconnected challenges facing Africa and the world at large. As new challenges emerge every day, civil society and other development actors need to embrace creativity and innovation to meet the evolving development challenges of the modern world.
There are myriad of challenges facing Africa today, ranging from climate change, widespread inequalities across most sectors, gender discrimination, civil unrest, escalating poverty rates, changing disease situations, pandemics and other natural calamities. It is against this worrying backdrop that civil societies have found themselves with no option but to explore the need to be more innovative, relevant, and adaptive in their operations.
In most part of Africa, the growing trend of men and women, especially the youth, engaging in creative art and cultural expressions highlighting injustices, discrimination, rights of women from their point of view, offers great potential for the promotion of sustainable development. Thus, music, film, spoken word, activism, graffiti and theatre are some of the powerful cultural expressions that are effectively contributing towards a sustainably-developed Africa and the world in general.
Therefore, World Creativity and Innovation Day is celebrated on 21st April to encourage people to generate new ideas in order to make the world a better place to live.
Today more than ever, the COVID-19 pandemic crisis shows us the importance of creativity and innovation on everybody’s part, men and women, in order to find different solutions to the socio-economic problems we are facing.
Hence, we must find new formulas that will enable us to emerge from this crisis, faster and stronger, building more resilient societies and without leaving anyone behind!
