President John Dramani Mahama
After being completely erased from this year’s budget, Ghana’s creative sector has been handed yet another promise: funding will come next year.
President John Dramani Mahama assured creatives during the Presidential Media Encounter that the creative arts will finally see allocations in the next fiscal budget — a pledge many say only proves how long the sector has been taken for granted.
“The Blackstar Experience will take off,” Mahama declared during a media encounter. “In the next budget we are going to make some allocation for the creative arts, for the film fund, to support Kumawood and all the filmmakers, to support the music industry, to support the arts. We need to put our money where our mouths are,” President Mahama said.
The assurance comes six months after Finance Minister Dr. Cassiel Ato Forson presented a 69-page budget on March 11, 2025 that did not mention tourism or creative arts. The Finance Minister at the time explained that the sector minister would be responsible for presenting detailed reports and plans for the sector to Parliament. Now, the president appears to be taking a different line.
The omission stunned industry players, given President Mahama’s own 2024 campaign manifesto and his unveiling of “The Black Star Experience” as a flagship cultural project.
The contrast with previous years is stark. In 2023, the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture received GH¢115.6 million; in 2024, the figure shot up to GH¢260.9 million. In 2025, it plummeted to zero.
For many, the president’s latest words do little to heal the sense of abandonment.
Meanwhile, President Mahama praised the arts industry arguing that the creative economy generates jobs faster than traditional sectors such as cocoa and manufacturing.
“Creative industries create jobs faster than the traditional sectors that we have known. The cocoa sector or manufacturing creates one job; the creative sector, digitalisation, knowledge industry, arts and things would have created five jobs. And so that is an area in which we have to continue to invest. And that is why we created that as a ministry together with tourism,” he indicated.
For now, the creative sector remains in limbo. Once again, artists, musicians, and filmmakers have been told to wait.