Mark Okraku Mantey
Mark Okraku Mantey, President, Creative Arts Council
The Ministry of Tourism, Arts & Culture has instituted monthly workshops for the creative sector to share knowledge and contribute ideas on how the nation can benefit from the arts.
The workshops are part of the ministry’s strategy to rope in creative artists as partners in development, thus, creating an enabling environment for using music, drama, movies, art and craft to influence and educate the masses while promoting issues of national interest such as sanitation and unemployment.
The first of these monthly workshops will take place on Tuesday, February 5, at the Accra Tourism Information Centre (ATIC), opposite Afrikiko Leisure Centre near Flagstaff House at 5:00pm.
In a statement issued in Accra, the ministry said the workshops will be in the form of master classes at which recognised experts will share knowledge and lead discussions culminating in the adoption of strategies and a plan of actions.
The statement said the initiative is in support of President Akufo-Addo’s commitment to use the creative arts as a tool to drive national development.
It said, “It is the wish of the ministry that arts and culture practitioners will participate in this programme whose ultimate goal is to demonstrate for all to see the power of arts and culture as a sine-qua-non in national development.”
The statement added, “Your advocacy and constructive criticisms have been taken on board. We can only pray that these workshops will get even better and more useful as all of us as stakeholders roll them out.”
“Let us all, as government, artists, the media and civil society, come together to prove the truth in what the late playwright, Prof. Joe de Graft, advocated in his play, Sons & Daughters, that ‘the arts also can pay.”