Thursday, 14th March is Ghana Culture Day. The Day was instituted in 2012 at the official launch of the Ghana Culture Forum - a membership-based civil society consultative and advocacy network of cultural practitioners, activists and organisations. We are united around a common vision of affirming the cultural foundations of development and building up the cultural sector.
The Ghana Culture Forum salutes all cultural practitioners, workers and intellectuals on the occasion of Ghana Culture Day. Together, we dedicate ourselves to ensuring that culture is no longer seen and treated as a barrier to development but rather as a foundation and anchor for the nation's development agenda. This is the vision of culture as enshrined in the Directive Principles of State Policy of the 1992 Constitution. The Ghana Culture Forum has spent the last year working with governmental agencies and the media to bring culture into the mainstream of the planning process.
We note with concern that our nation is yet to fully recognise the enormous force which will be released once the symbiotic relationship between culture and development is turned into programmes and projects. As things stand, culture and creative industries are on the periphery of national development programmes.
This has created a state of paralysis resulting in demoralisation of the practitioners in the culture and creative arts sector. One major challenge therefore, as we mark Ghana Culture Day, is that there needs to be a tangible change in the policy environment and attitudes towards culture both in the public and private sector to enable its mainstreaming into and act as the impetus for Ghana's social and economic transformation.
Despite the threat of despondency, there is a new wave of expectancy among cultural practitioners and advocates. The membership of the forum is dedicated to partner communities, the state, entrepreneurs and other stakeholders in a programme of rejuvenation and transformation of the Tourism, Culture and Creative Arts sector.
Our call, therefore, is for the envisioning and development of new policies, strategies and actions that will inspire cultural practitioners to be more relevant, increasingly creative and inventive and profoundly excellent in their various endeavours. Ghana Culture Day, we hope, will annually inspire the nation to assert its dignity and place in the world of the future.
Signed by the Conveners
PROFESSOR ESI SUTHERLAND-ADDY AKUNU DAKE
CHAIRPERSON/CONVENER VICE CHAIRPERSON/CONVENER
INTERIM GOVERNING COUNCIL INTERIM GOVERNING COUNCIL
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