Daily Times

Beaconhouse National University (BNU), Pakistan’s first not-for-profit Liberal Arts University, is set to commence work on the project, “Improving Data Collection among National and Provincial Statistical Agencies to Strengthen Policymaking for the Cultural and Creative Industries”.

The project was approved for funding under the 13th call of the International Fund for Cultural Diversity (IFCD) earlier this year. The international call under IFCD received 610 proposals, globally. BNU’s proposal is one of only eleven proposals that were selected for funding. The project will be co-led by BNU faculty including Dr. Izza Aftab and Mr. Zaeem Yaqoob Khan. The project will develop locally relevant harmonized definitions of “culture”, “creative trades”, and “cultural goods” for Pakistan, followed by a detailed mapping exercise to determine how to benefit these sectors and communities in the prevailing market conditions. The final outcome would be a validated, robust framework for cultural and creative sectors and practitioners to estimate local gross domestic product. The project aims to put Pakistan and public agencies in a position to answer simple yet pertinent questions about the contribution of culture and creative sectors to GDP and employment. In case of Pakistan, there is no single harmonized definition of culture, creative trades and cultural goods at the policy level. It is one of the key reasons that despite the best efforts of the data collection agencies and independent researchers, the publicly available datasets on cultural and creative industries and occupations remain fuzzy and are not comprehensive enough to inform evidence based policy making. As a first step, the project will develop relevant and acceptable definitions, in line with Pakistan’s international commitments to document a sector that has survived in spite of being on the public backburner. The project team will conduct analyses and comparisons of proposed definitions with UNESCO’s Framework (2009) in order to build internationally comparable and locally relevant definitions. The rationale behind the excercise is to have a functional definition that can be used in survey instruments to lead to robust findings for data collection exercises. The International Fund for Cultural Diversity (IFCD) is one of the key instruments of international cooperation and assistance of the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005).