<p>Chair Of PEC International Council John Newbigin and Director Of Creative Economy At The British Council Rehana Mughal&nbsp;were Nile FM's Guest On "The Big Breakfast".&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Can you tell us more about the international forum for creative initiative, cultural policies, and the most important discussion points the forum focuses on?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Rehana:</strong> We have a group of people called the Global Creative Economy forum that we worked through and these are people who operate around the world in every continent and island nation and they&rsquo;re coming to Cairo. They&rsquo;re arriving today actually. So they are the center of this forum because they&rsquo;re providing insights about how creative economies around the world are growing. Now this is a growing area because there are so many opportunities for young people and young creative talents to engage with, expressing themselves through creativity but at the same time using this creativity as a means to make a living and to be an entrepreneur to set up their own businesses. The forum is focused on looking at what the shifting nature of the creative economy around the world and where the opportunities might be for young Egyptians, the talented creative people here to engage with those shifting narratives.</p>
<p><strong>What is a Creative Economy?</strong></p>
<p><strong>John:</strong> I have been involved in creating The Creative Economy Policies for the UK for the last 25 years and really, when I ask one of our senior administrators in our trade department, &ldquo;How do you define creative economy?&rdquo; She said, &ldquo;It is a state of mind.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Basically, it is all the areas where arts and technology come together and though a lot of it is activities that have been around since the world began, it is craft, it&rsquo;s dance, it&rsquo;s music, it&rsquo;s fashion. It is the things that we have been doing as long as we&rsquo;ve been human beings, but it has been transformed by digital technology and it has been added to by film, TV, and video games, which of course now it&rsquo;s a huge area around the world and marketing, advertising, and architecture, there are a lot of industries that have a cultural component as well as a technology component and that&rsquo;s really what we define as creative economy.</p>
<p>The interesting thing for us on the international forum is that every country has a slightly different definition and everybody is exploring new ways to make it grow. One of the reasons we are having this event thing in Cairo this week is because Africa as a continent is really the fastest growing area in the creative economy anywhere in the world, East Asia of course is also growing in Europe and in North America and Latin America, but Africa is the continent where everybody expects with this great explosion of activity going on and it&rsquo;s probably because of kids having access to digital networks and thinking about how traditional culture forum can be played out.</p>
<p><strong>The British Council and Creative Industries Policy &amp; Evidence Centre (PEC) are collaborating on this initiative, can you tell us more about this collaboration?</strong></p>
<p><strong>John:</strong> The PEC, Policy &amp; Evidence Centre, was set up by the UK Government to look at the relationship between universities and the emerging creative economy, but it was very much focused on what is happening in the UK, and the UK only.</p>
<p>Our concern is that there is good learning going on, good practice going on all around the world, and it is important for us in the UK to be plugged into what other people are thinking and for all of us to be changing ideas because no one has got a complete formula on this.</p>
<p>So the British Council generously offered this as a part of its contribution to the Policy &amp; Evidence Centre to fund an international forum. It pulls together 15 or 16 people from all around the world. Some academics, some investors, some practitioners. We meet together, we discuss issues that reflect on the needs of the creative economy.&rdquo;</p>
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<p><strong>How can a creative economy contribute to societal growth and development in Africa and specifically in Egypt?</strong></p>
<p><strong>John:</strong> There are a number of things. One is this is an an area that is generating jobs very very fast and so many countries are suffering from a growing issue of youth unemployment. That often means that the most talented young people leave the country. One of the things about these businesses is that they are inherently attractive to young people, they&rsquo;re people businesses, you can&rsquo;t just replace them with technologies like a car factory, where you can make twice as many cars by having robots rather than humans. These are businesses that require the emotional intelligence, the social sensitivities of real people.</p>
<p>The other thing is that what we are finding all around the world is that the creative economy generates innovation wide across the economy. It starts in a way with leisure and entertainment at the heart of it, but the creative industries are now influencing education, health, engineering, and all kinds of other aspects of the economy, benefitting from creative, innovative ideas that the creative entrepreneurs come up with.&rdquo;</p>
<p>2021 was the United Nation&rsquo;s year of the creative economy&rsquo;s contribution to sustainable development so for the United Nations, one of the key aspects of the creative economy is it helps us develop a more sustainable economy as well, that&rsquo;s the other big dimension which is of interest to governments all around the world.</p>
<p><strong>Do you think Artificial intelligence is a threat to the creative economy?</strong></p>
<p><strong>John:</strong> Artificial intelligence is here and it&rsquo;s not going to go away as you know the world is divided into people who think it&rsquo;s going to be a game-changer in a positive way, and people who think it&rsquo;s a huge existential threat. It&rsquo;s a tool, and it&rsquo;s going to assist us to express creativity in new ways, to explore creativity in new ways, of course, it&rsquo;s important that human creatives are recognized for who they are and we don&rsquo;t allow machines and humans to become tangled with each other but I think we have to think of AI as a positive contribution to being able to express talent and creative ideas and exchange creative ideas in new and innovative ways, so we need to embrace it and think about it in a positive way.</p>
<p>In Creative England, an organization that I helped set up a few years ago, their slogan was &ldquo;Talent is everywhere but opportunity is not&rdquo; So what we are trying to do, and what this forum is about is how we connect all the talents that are out there with more opportunities for people to make a living, to make a good livelihood for themselves, but also to contribute to their society and their economies.</p>
<p><strong>What would you say are some of the most important creative industries that are expected to grow in Egypt?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Rehana:</strong> In Egypt, you have such a strong track record in music, in fashion, in literature, so the strong foundation is already there with the developments of new technologies it enables young people to be able to increase their reach of who might get exposure to their creative talent whether that fashion or music or literature or anything else.</p>
<p>So we are really excited about seeing these particular areas grow but also excited about what will happen, through collaboration between the different elements of creative industries because new technologies have meant that people can start thinking about some of the traditional art forms in different ways, so you might be familiar with theatre becoming a more immersive experience or cinema, and going to see a film becoming more immersive experience with the use of new technologies but also through the use of how those different art forms are coming together and you can go for a night out which is actually an immersive experience rather than a very traditional sort of 2D cultural experience so I think particularly here in Egypt there is so much dynamic, creative talent and imagination and people move at pace and keen to collaborate.</p>
<p>So we are really looking forward to what&rsquo;s going to emerge.</p>
<p><strong>Can you tell us about the British Council&rsquo;s work in the creative economy and how this work contributes to Egypt?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Rehana:</strong> Our work in creative economy at the British Council focuses on three main areas one of which is leadership and learning, and we also focus on sector development and research insight and advocacy.</p>
<p>In the area of leadership and learning, we support those people that are working in the creative industries to develop their leadership skills, by connecting them with like-minded professionals in the UK but we also support people who are working for example in governments in policy training.</p>
<p>We have this hybrid model of policy training so you can do it a mixture of online and offline, we delivered it in about 13 countries so far and over 1000 people have been through our policy training scheme.</p>
<p>It&rsquo;s available in several languages and we are really delighted to be working with the Ministry of Culture here In Egypt to support them to participation in that policy training, and I&rsquo;m hoping later this week that we will also be in a position to sign a memorandum of understanding with the ministry of culture around creative economy and supporting creative economy here in Egypt.</p>
<p>in the area of research, insight, and advocacy we work in over 34 countries and we try to understand what are the key triggers in the creative economy, what are the trends? what are the opportunities? And develop the insight with a view to developing the right kind of projects in a country, and to support the cultural institutions to be able to take forward their ideas around what they like to do to grow and support their creative economy to thrive.</p>
<p>In the area of sector development, we support young creatives with a little bit of seed funding so they can set up their own enterprises and businesses, with a fair amount of that across the continent of Africa, and we also support professionals from Egypt and other countries around the world to come to the UK to see creative hubs and to see this kind of space that enables creatives to collaborate with each other and also to meet with professionals working in the sector.</p>
<p>We also focus very much on developing the talent pipeline, which is the next generation of young creatives that may choose to go to university or may choose to actually enter the creative industry from a young age and develop their skills on the job, so we try to find opportunities for them too. &nbsp;</p>
<p>Cause not everybody wants a formal education, not everybody can afford a formal education, and actually, young people today are leaning toward not going on a career that is lifelong, but actually having a bit more of a portfolio, more of a freelance career, but also being in charge of their employment and making the choices that effect their lives.</p>
<p><strong>You&rsquo;ve talked about all the successes that BC had in Egypt and in the African region, can you tell us about the most important successes they had in the UK?</strong></p>
<p><strong>John:</strong> There&rsquo;s a great Chinese/American musician called Yo Yo Ma, who runs an international orchestra, and one of his favorite sayings is &ldquo;Creativity happens when cultures overlap&rdquo; and one of the reasons the creative economy had been successful in the UK is because it is incredibly diverse, the range of people who contribute to it.</p>
<p>What makes our creative economy successful is that, it&rsquo;s a fusion of cultures from around the world, and the reason why it makes sense for us to be working so closely with the british council, is that it&rsquo;s about building cultural relationships and understanding, exchanging ideas, building trust between countries and between different traditions.</p>
<p>So I think the benefit that this is had for the UK, is if you connect us with an even wider range of really creative people, with creative thinking around the world, and that benefits us and hopefully it will benefit other people as well.</p>

Chair Of PEC International Council John Newbigin And Director Of Creative Economy At The British Council Rehana Mughal On The Effect Of Creative Economy In Egypt

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