The impact of the cultural sector beyond numbers on seats
The African Centre for Cities and Goethe Institute (GI) have published a study that provides insight into the role culture plays in sub-Saharan Africa, and why it’s important to consider the arts’ impact beyond numbers in seats. The research process intended to facilitate the development of a relatively effortless, qualitative evaluation approach for the cultural sector; what has been have termed by the research team, ‘Impact Narrativing.’
Imagining Impacts investigated the role of culture in sub-Saharan Africa, primarily by drawing on the insights of a purposive cohort comprising art practitioners, collectives, and scholars, who respectively represented a cultural initiative that was awarded Goethe-Institut funding to implement an intervention in Africa at varying stages over a 12-year period. The research culminated in a comprehensive toolkit, a YouTube video and six impact narratives.
Rike Sitas, Principal Investigator on the project, explains ACC’s interest in the study: “The ACC and the GI have a longstanding relationship and we’d been interacting around a lot of projects in the past. When Asma Diakate [Head of the Cultural department at GI] joined, it was a continuation of a longer-term conversation around what the cultural sector means in sub-Saharan Africa and particularly in cities… In this case it was really thinking through the role of the cultural sector but also how we measure impact, how we think about impact, and how we maybe need to re-language impact to make more sense for the sector.”
Study implementers acknowledged the challenge of implementing a retrospective evaluation of this nature, since eligibility for GI funding is not contingent on an applicant’s fulfilment of stipulated monitoring and evaluation (M&E) requirements. However, the absence of common assessment frameworks, tracking systems and indicators across projects, foreclosed this study’s deployment of conventional impact measurements. Implementers were thus called upon to give practical expression to the Imagining component of the study title, designing creative yet rigorous study methods and processes.
Khanya Mncwabe, who has extensive experience in monitoring and evaluation, says the project left her with a deeper appreciation of the role played by the cultural sector: “[Artists] help us to grapple with difficult historicities, they help us to form new imaginaries. I think that often that role is under appreciated and so I really hope that the impact of this project is for a deeper understanding and a deeper appreciation of what the cultural sector brings to us as a collective society beyond the measures that we usually deploy to understand it which is how many people attended a performance and what was the immediate result of that,” Mncwabe says.
Download the toolkit and six-part impact narratives below:
