Southern African creatives’ indaba in Windhoek

The Music In Africa Foundation (Miaf) in partnership with the Goethe-Institut and Ngandu Events will be taking stock this week on how funding has improved and capacitated organisations funded by the Sound Connects Fund.

During an interview with unWrap.online at the welcoming session, Patience Mwasinga said five Namibian organisations benefited from the 341 000 euro financial injection to uplift creatives in the region.

“We started off with 11 grants and every time we give the grants, we do a networking session, so all these organisations from different countries can meet and exchange notes, sometimes their projects are even the same. We started off very well, we have done several projects and received good feedback.

“We also give grants to lusophone and anglophone countries – so from the first one we learned that we needed a lot of support, especially with Angola and Mozambique, so we had special projects with translators who speak Portuguese. Even now our project runs were changed. We have translators to translate the call in Portuguese and we received a lot of applications,” she said.

It is unfortunate that not all these applications can be accommodated because of funding limitations, said Mwasinga.

The networking session in Windhoek on Sunday was the third for organisations of the southern African region.

According to Mwasinga, they conducted a baseline survey to identify new markets and find new ways of funding, as well as exploring digital technology to improve their marketing.

“Our training capacitates in things like fundraising, digitisation, managing your brand and how you tell your story out there. What we have discovered is that we have very good organisations, but a lot of them lack the funding to implement their ideas and projects and to build their institutional capacity. We all give leadership training and the sector of the project deals with monitoring and evaluation, so that they can know on which areas to work. Also a lot of good audit support, so by the end of this project they would be effectively capacitated,” she said.

The Sound Connects Fund is made possible with funding from the ACP-EU Culture programme, a project implemented by the Organisation of the African, Caribbean and Pacific States, and funded by the European Union.

To date, it has extended funding to eligible creative and cultural industry organisations based in Angola, Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. – unWrap.online