Culture project: Identity Building and Sharing Business Initiative
Boosting the creative industries
Culture reflects a people’s uniqueness, value and heritage. Strengthening a nation’s culture through its art, fashion and design, builds social networks, reinforces identities and creates trade and business opportunities.
The International Trade Centre’s Ethical Fashion Initiative (EFI) Culture showcases creativity and talent in art, photography, cinema and music in Côte d’Ivoire, Iran, Kenya, Mali, Tajikistan, Uganda and Uzbekistan.
We work with the private sector to strengthen these cultural sectors and increase their exports.
EFI builds on existing skills and creativity, investing in human, productive and marketing capacity to bring intrinsic value to the surface, so people across the world can enjoy it and the communities creating it can thrive.
The EU supports the EFI Culture Programme as part of “Investing in Culture and Creativity,” launched in 2017.
Sustainable Development Goals
<p>EFI has mobilised consumers and creative skills to leverage a new positioning for artisans from marginalized communities in the international markets of lifestyle and fashion/luxury. EFI has enabled new creative talents to trade internationally and to get access to platforms of e-commerce and promotion that are reshaping the segment of ethical fashion, which is now a mainstream part of the market.</p><p>EFI’s experience illustrates how investing in human capital through culture means bringing about change at the level of:</p><ul><li>Individuals, who become involved in training, capacity building and personal transformation/consciousness raising, workshops and/or business processes, dialogue and encounters;</li><li>Consumers and citizens, who become mobilized through media and/or action campaigns;</li><li>Professional development, supply and collaboration networks, who become involved through a series of relationship-building processes, joint efforts and practical programs on substantive problems linked to product development and market responses; and,</li><li>Communities, where social capital is developed and/ or solidified by connecting new human resources (from the informal sector) to existing formal business and social networks.</li></ul>
