The Sunday Mail
Enacy Mapakame Business Reporter
“A solution for Africa by Africans, a chance to market Africa to the world.”
These were sentiments by a Harare -based graphic designer and brand strategist, Percy Bondeponde, following the launch of a regional portal that curates creative works from Africa.
Launched last week in Botswana, Dumela Creative Stock, is an image, audio and video bank that will benefit creatives in Botswana, Zimbabwe and the whole region with access to a wider market, creating opportunities for export earnings.
This stock curates works from the region’s photographers, videographers, sound engineers and markets and retails them to the world creating a reliable revenue income stream.
“This will help with Intellectual Property Rights. With this, photographers and artists can get paid for their work as cases of internet image theft have been on the rise,” he said.
The initiative, a brainchild of Botswana- based advertising and communications experts, Primrose Mimi Modimakwane and Itumeleng Garebatshabe, came after observing advertising agencies in particular ,struggle with sourcing local images for their international campaigns, as well as concerns from the market calling for local images to be used in films, billboards and other communication mediums.
This prompted the two entrepreneurs to pioneer the image bank and serve the interests and needs of the creative industry with images that reflect the true African story, while enhancing chances of reaching a global market and earn foreign currency.
“Having been a head of client services for a top local advertising agency, and then running my own communications agency, I was tired of being disappointed by designers having to use images I couldn’t relate to, to depict the look and feel my strategies would require. Photoshoots can be costly, and sometimes we need relatable images on demand and at the click of a button, and the international image banks just weren’t meeting the needs of the African market”, Ms Modimakwane said.
As creative entrepreneurs themselves, the founders of the online bank, joined efforts to not only provide a solution for the African creative in terms of an online bank to find relatable and authentic African images from African creators, but also to generate a source of revenue for the creator.
“The Citizen Entrepreneurial Development Agency (CEDA), has come up with new guidelines for the Botswana-based entrepreneur and one of the significant opportunities for the creative industry is the inclusion of Intellectual Property (IP) as a mode of security for financing.
“We believe that having ones IP marketed and sold both locally and internationally will significantly increase its value and further increase the creators’ potential to grow their business and income through strategic financing,” Ms Modimakwane said.
The Dumela Creative Stock registers photographers and other creatives from across Africa as sellers who then upload content, and enables them to track purchases and see when money comes into their account on the platform.
“It has taken us almost three years to develop this online bank because our aim was to make it seamless and easy for the creative to create, engage and earn money without taking time away from what they do best. We wanted to construct a simple payment gateway that was instant, and able to show the seller when real money comes into their account after a sale,” said Mr Garebatshabe.
Advertising executives, local creative directors, media practitioners and graphic designers can register on the bank as buyers of content enabling them to use creative works from the local industry.
“This initiative was long overdue. As creatives in Zimbabwe and Africa, we have been relying on images from international platforms like Getty Images and Shutterstock yet clients want something closer to home. Dumela Creative Stock also comes at a time Africa is catching up with digitalisation across all sectors with internet penetration on a steady increase.”
In March this year, average internet penetration in Africa was sitting at 39,3 percent, and 47,5 percent in Botswana, according to Statista.org. In Zimbabwe, internet penetration was 59,1 percent by end of the 2020 first quarter.
