Culture as a form of Infrastructure

When we speak about infrastructure, our minds understandably turn to roads, ports, airports, electricity, water systems and telecommunications. These are the physical and institutional systems through which an economy moves people, goods, information and capital. Without them, productivity suffers, and markets become harder to reach. Yet there is another kind of infrastructure that receives far less attention in our economic conversations, and it’s that same infrastructure that creates the desire to enter a market in the first place.

Culture can perform that function. Culture is that infrastructure.

This does not mean that culture should be treated as a substitute for roads, hospitals, ports or reliable electricity. Nor does it mean that every festival, performance or traditional ceremony automatically qualifies as an economic investment. My argument is narrower: when culture consistently moves attention, people, ideas and expenditure towards a place, it begins to function as infrastructure for demand. A road helps someone reach Kumasi. Culture can give someone in London, Atlanta or Kingston a reason to want to come to Kumasi in the first place.

That distinction between infrastructure that facilitates demand and infrastructure that creates demand deserves greater attention in Ghana. We spend considerable effort asking whether we have sufficient hotel rooms, airport capacity, roads, conference facilities and tourist attractions. Those are legitimate supply-side questions. But an airport does not create an emotional reason for a traveller to choose Ghana rather than Senegal, Rwanda, Morocco or Nigeria. A new hotel does not automatically generate the desire to sleep in it. Capacity matters, but capacity without demand remains underutilised infrastructure.

Culture can be an export in two directions.

One reason we underestimate culture economically is that we still tend to think about exports as physical goods crossing a border. Cocoa leaves Ghana. Gold leaves Ghana. Manufactured goods leave Ghana. And foreign exchange comes back. Hurray!

Bear in mind that cultural commerce works differently because sometimes the product travels to the consumer and, at other times, the consumer travels to the product.

When Ghanaian music is streamed in another country, when a film is licensed abroad, when kente or Ghanaian design is purchased internationally, culture has crossed the border. When someone instead flies into Ghana because of our history, festivals, food, music, traditional institutions or connection to the African diaspora, the consumer has crossed the border to reach the culture. Both can generate export earnings.

The scale of the first model is already substantial internationally. UN Trade and Development reported in its Creative Economy Outlook that global exports of creative services reached approximately US$1.4 trillion in 2022, having grown by 29% since 2017, while exports of creative goods reached US$713 billion. Across countries surveyed by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), creative industries accounted for between 0.5% and 7.3% of GDP and between 0.5% and 12.5% of employment. Culture therefore is not merely a matter of national identity. Once intellectual property, technology, payments and distribution systems are attached to it, culture participates directly in trade.

Reminder: Attention is not yet economic value

This is where I believe our cultural-economic strategy must become more sophisticated. Attention is valuable, but attention itself is not revenue. A million people can watch a festival online without one cedi reaching the community that produced it. A cultural symbol can become globally fashionable while the people who inherited it own none of the intellectual property, distribution or commercial infrastructure surrounding it.

The economic question is therefore not simply whether culture attracts attention. It is whether we have built systems that can convert that attention into transactions and then retain a meaningful portion of those transactions within the local economy.

Ghana Statistical Service gives us an instructive picture of what happens when international visitors enter the country. Its 2025 Inbound Overnight Visitors Report, covering October 2022 to September 2023, estimates roughly 888,500 inbound overnight visitors and total expenditure of about GH¢15.2 billion. The average length of stay was 12 nights. Total quarterly expenditure rose from roughly GH¢3.5 billion in the final quarter of 2022 to GH¢5.2 billion in the third quarter of 2023.

The expenditure pattern is even more revealing. Accommodation together with food and beverages accounted for about 60% of visitor expenditure. Self-arranged travellers accounted for approximately 97% of total spending. This tells us something important about the economics surrounding cultural demand: the money does not remain at the festival ground, museum, palace or performance venue. The attraction may create the reason for movement, but value is captured through an ecosystem of hotels, restaurants, transport providers, retailers, telecommunications companies, payment platforms, artisans and service businesses.

We should be equally careful not to misuse these figures. The GH¢15.2 billion was not generated by cultural tourism alone. GSS identifies visiting friends and relatives, business and professional travel, and leisure among the main motivations for visiting Ghana. But that limitation actually strengthens the broader argument. Tourism is an interconnected demand system. If culture is capable of increasing the number of visitors, extending the length of their stay or increasing their propensity to spend, its economic consequences will appear across industries that may not themselves be classified as cultural.

Public spending should be measured, not romanticised

This brings us to the difficult question of government support for cultural events. There are people who assume that public money spent on a festival is automatically wasteful because government should be building roads, hospitals or schools instead. There are others who assume that anything promoting culture and tourism automatically deserves public funding. Neither position is rigorous enough.

The right question is measurement
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has developed specific frameworks for assessing the local impact of cultural, sporting and business events. Its guidance goes beyond crowd sizes and publicity to consider economic, social and environmental outcomes. Among the issues policymakers should examine are employment, local business participation, tourism, investment, skills, social inclusion and the longer-term legacy created by an event.

For Ghana, that means we should be able to ask much harder questions after a publicly supported cultural event. How many visitors came because of it? How long did they remain? What was the incremental hotel occupancy? How much was spent on transport, food, entertainment and retail? How many Ghanaian businesses supplied the event? What proportion of procurement went to local firms? How many jobs were temporary and how many became permanent? What additional taxes were collected? What percentage of spending leaked outside the local economy? How many first-time visitors returned? How much international media value was generated, and did that attention create measurable future demand?

If the additional economic, social and reputational value generated by an event significantly exceeds the public resources committed to it, then describing that expenditure simply as an “event subsidy” becomes economically incomplete. It may also represent investment in tourism, place branding, local enterprise and national positioning. Conversely, if the evidence shows little additional demand or local benefit, patriotic language should not protect poor expenditure from scrutiny.

Evidence from elsewhere on the continent suggests that the opportunity is real. UNESCO reported that ten arts and cultural festivals across nine Southern African countries generated more than US$11.7 million in economic activity and nearly 3,000 jobs in 2024. I am not saying every Ghanaian festival will produce the same result. It means cultural events are capable of becoming economic platforms when the surrounding commercial systems are deliberately designed to capture the demand they create.

Markets can move before institutions do

There is another lesson here for governments, corporations and traditional authorities. Institutional recognition and market demand are not the same thing. Institutions regulate, certify, finance, legitimise and protect. Those functions are important. But institutions do not always create consumer desire, and markets sometimes discover value before formal gatekeepers understand what is happening.

Music repeatedly demonstrates this. A sound can emerge from a neighbourhood, spread through diaspora communities, accelerate through TikTok or streaming platforms and develop international demand before any ministry, broadcaster or established institution has decided that it deserves global attention. Fashion behaves similarly. So do food, film and technology. Consumers can validate something economically long before institutions validate it administratively.

The good response is not to diminish institutions but to redefine their role. When organic demand appears, institutions should learn how to recognise it early, protect the underlying cultural asset, remove friction, develop standards, attract capital and build infrastructure around the opportunity. Government does not have to manufacture every cultural movement. Sometimes its most productive role is to stop an existing movement from colliding with avoidable barriers.

Distribution is where influence becomes income

This is perhaps the central economic point. Cultural influence translates into economic value when distribution converts attention into transactions.

The creator needs intellectual-property protection and platforms. The artisan needs payments, logistics and market access. The festival needs ticketing, accommodation, transportation and promotion. The heritage destination needs sanitation, guides, security, roads and booking infrastructure. The filmmaker needs distribution and licensing. The musician needs rights administration and streaming infrastructure. The tourism economy needs aviation connectivity, visas, digital payments, hospitality capacity and credible information.

Digitalisation has already changed this relationship dramatically. UNCTAD attributes much of the expansion in creative services to digital technologies that allow cultural and creative products to reach customers without relying exclusively on traditional physical distribution. Ghana's own tourism authorities have recognised the same principle at the transaction level. The Ghana Tourism Authority's partnership with Visa, for example, sought to expand digital payments at tourist attractions and events and to improve the ease with which visitor demand could translate into actual revenue.

The implication is simple: cultural visibility without distribution can create fame without prosperity.

Ownership matters as much as attraction

We must also resist the temptation to commercialise everything simply because culture can create economic value. Some traditions are sacred. Some spaces should remain protected. Some ceremonies lose their meaning if they are redesigned primarily for spectators. The economic use of heritage must therefore be governed by stewardship rather than extraction.

Traditional communities should ask not just how many visitors came, but who captured the value. Who owns the accommodation? Who supplies the food? Who makes the clothing? Who receives licensing income? Who owns the images and recordings? Who operates the tours? Who provides transportation? Who controls ticketing? Who tells the story? Who receives the data generated by visitors?

If a community generates cultural demand but owns almost none of the businesses through which that demand is monetised, then the culture may remain local while the economics migrate elsewhere. The real opportunity is not merely to attract expenditure but to deepen local participation in the value chain through entrepreneurship, skills, financing, technology and ownership.

Traditional authority has an economic role without becoming a business

This is also where I believe traditional leadership must rethink its place in the modern economy. Traditional rulers do not need to become hotel operators, event promoters or substitutes for government ministries. Our comparative advantages are different. Traditional institutions hold history, convening power, cultural legitimacy, community memory and relationships that frequently survive political cycles.

Those assets can be intelligently connected to capital, enterprise, academia, technology, tourism, and the diaspora. We can preserve what must remain sacred while making other elements of our heritage more accessible. We can document oral histories before they disappear, support artisans in reaching larger markets, improve the quality of cultural experiences, convene investors around local opportunities and insist that communities participate meaningfully in the prosperity generated by their heritage.

As I begin my own service as Aboafoɔhene of Kona within Asanteman, this intersection between inherited institutions and modern economic systems is one I believe deserves serious attention. Tradition and enterprise should not be treated as opposing forces. The question is how modern tools can strengthen ancient institutions without stripping them of authenticity, and how those institutions can help create opportunity without turning culture into a commodity devoid of meaning.

Ghana already possesses many of the scarce assets. Ghana has a rich history, identity, music, food, craftsmanship, festivals, traditional institutions, diaspora relations, and cultural credibility. What we need to improve is the conversion architecture around those assets like measurement, distribution, payments, intellectual property, local enterprise, hospitality, technology, investment and ownership.

Roads move vehicles. Ports move cargo. Telecommunications move information. Culture can move attention, identity, trust and people. Once those movements are deliberately connected to enterprise and transactions, culture stops sitting at the edge of the economy as entertainment or nostalgia.

Culture becomes part of the infrastructure underneath it all.

Thank you for reading. I welcome your reflections, questions, and suggestions for future topics. Subscribe to the ‘Entrepreneur In You’ newsletter here: https://lnkd.in/d-hgCVPy, follow me on all social platforms at @thisisthemax, or get weekly updates via my official WhatsApp channel: www.bit.ly/whatsappthemax.

Wishing you a purposeful and successful week ahead!

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The author, Dr. Maxwell Ampong, serves as the CEO of Maxwell Investments Group. He is also an Honorary Curator at the Ghana National Museum and the Official Business Advisor with Ghana’s largest agricultural trade union under Ghana’s Trade Union Congress (TUC). Founder of WellMax Inclusive Insurance and WellMax Micro-Credit Enterprise, Dr. Ampong writes on relevant economic topics and provides general perspective pieces. ‘Entrepreneur In You’ operates under the auspices of the Africa School of Entrepreneurship, an initiative of Maxwell Investments Group.

Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author, Dr. Maxwell Ampong, and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position, or beliefs of Maxwell Investments Group or any of its affiliates. Any references to policy or regulation reflect the author’s interpretation and are not intended to represent the formal stance of Maxwell Investments Group. This content is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or investment advice. Readers should seek independent advice before making any decisions based on this material. Maxwell Investments Group assumes no responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions in the content or for any actions taken based on the information provided.

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