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I had this webinar too to attend on Zoom, held by the Arts and Tourism Writers Association of Ghana (ATWAG) where the President of the Creative Arts Council, Mark Okraku-Mantey spelt out some efforts government has made in growing the creative arts sector in Ghana.

One of a range of activities lined up by ATWAG for the rest of the year, including separate webinars on culture, tourism, good writing skills and blogging, in the offing, ATWAG also plans to hold an encounter designed to engage the political parties on what they have in their manifestos for the arts.

So, today's encounter was important. I had an appointment that clashed with the time which I had to meet. But, thankfully, my pal and fellow association member, Kwame D, got all the gist and would answer all my enquiries later.

Although the activities of the council have been fraught with challenges, Mark had admitted, there have been some successes too, explaining that government could not deliver on the promise of building ultramodern theatres.

And although measures were afoot to provide some of those huge mobile tents for events, the advent of COVID-19 has indeed, effectively stalled the process.

Noting that there has been an online research to quantify how much has been lost by reason of COVID-19 pandemic, that research informed the allocation of the 50 million dollars to National Board for Small Scale Industries (NBSSI) for disbursement to the creative arts industry. And so far, it seems monies have been disbursed to members of the creative arts who applied for the CAP-NBSSI loans.

One of the banes of this industry has always been the challenge of the acquisition of information for breakdown into data. There is scarcely any scientific data on members of the creative arts sector, or the myriad of work being put in, and this single debacle, makes budgetary allocation for the sector difficult.

So, I wasn't surprised when KD mentioned this issue raised as a pertinent one for the Council. It is for many other sectors. And, it was instructive and exciting to hear that Mark stated the Council had developed a digital system to collate data on its members. Yaaaay!

He also admitted that some sectors of the industry (especially the movie sector) are weak and need serious overhaul.

The Creative Arts Law, a key legislative that is going to help regulate our sector is still undergoing parliamentary action, and I hear our firebrand buddy, Halifax, admonished it be passed quickly before parliament goes on recess, and, or risk the passage of the law drag should it elapse into next year.

I was happy ATWAG, a national professional association of travel and arts writers/journalists and media practitioners, managed to get this activity off the ground.

We have, hitherto, been facing challenges as to how we can gather to engage with stakeholders of the arts, tourism and culture space, to know how things are faring, ask questions and proffer ideas to progress.

In the face of all the COVID restrictions, like many other innovations coming out of this era, we found a way! As my friend Hadiza keeps saying to me, give me lemons and watch me make lemonade, with a dash of vanilla essence!