Leadership (Abuja)
Isaac Aimurie
21 August 2008
Regular training programme for artists and Crafts men and women, adaptation of foreign technology and aggressive marketing strategies were yesterday in Abuja identified as the needed stimulant for the Arts and crafts sector.
Professor Ben Ekanem of the university of Uyo Akwa Ibom State who delivered a paper at the investment forum of the on-going 1st international African arts and Crafts Expo (AFAC) 2008, recommended that training would provide the much needed skills for producing the arts and crafts in quantity, variety and quality as well as providing ground upon which more advanced technologies be domesticated and absorbed into the Nigerian culture.
Welcoming guests to the forum, Director/Chief executive Officer, National Council for Arts and Culture, Mr. Malgwi Maidugu, noted that the investment forum segment of the overall expo was designed primarily as a spring board through which Arts and Crafts practitioners could strike up a corridor for the financing and marketing of the abundant potentials in the sector.
"A quantum of gifted practitioners in the Arts and Crafts Sector is limited in expanding the frontiers of their businesses by lack of access to credit. They further lack the awareness on the appropriate steps to take in accessing credit facilities from the financial service providers.
"This forum is intended to break such widening between the financial service sector and the Small and Medium Scale Enterprises in the art and crafts sectors," Maidugu said
Describing the investment forum as a well laid strategy for achieving rapid economic development in Africa, in line with the vision of the new Economic Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) chairman senate committee on culture and tourism, senator Dahiru Bako Gassol charged organisers and participants at the event to put in place an endowment fund for arts, as well as a vibrant cultural policy that would guide stakeholders in the sector.
The fund, Gassol maintained would serve as a central purse managed by a trusted board from which resources for genuine investment in the arts and crafts industry could be obtained.
Ekenem argued that arts and crafts could reverse problems of rural/urban migration and youth unemployment if city dwellers and rural dwellers could engage in it, while calling on government to establish craft villages to serve as platform for cross fertilisation of creative ideas among practitioners.
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