South Africa's creative economy isn't being written in government offices or corporate boardrooms alone. It's happening on stages – in Makhanda, Oudtshoorn, Potchefstroom, Cape Town and Stellenbosch and across South Africa as touring theatre and music productions crisscross the provinces.
Image by Nardus Engelbrecht
It’s a quiet collaboration between cultural institutions that decided to do something radical together.
After just one year, the Festival Enterprise Catalyst — a R20m public-private partnership between the National Arts Festival, Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees, Aardklop, Suidoosterfees, Woordfees, Concerts SA, Samro, the Tribuo Fund and The Jobs Fund — has already challenged conventional thinking about funding the arts and creating more jobs in the creative economy.
It's a story about what becomes possible when single festivals and organisations transform their connection points into circuits of opportunity.
The numbers add up. In its first year (2024-2025), the FEC supported eight new theatre productions and six touring productions, creating 382 jobs.
It offered free training to over 200 beneficiaries and enabled 106 music tours across South Africa and the SADC region. But these aren't abstract metrics. They represent musicians earning income across nine countries.
They represent theatre companies that can plan their tours beyond their home cities and in advance. It’s about building a direct path between creators and work, work and reward.
Take the Concerts SA Mobility Grants programme. Through two micro-grant processes, 112 grants translated into 345 concerts across all nine provinces and spanning from Botswana to Zimbabwe — hosted in 228 different venues.
Or consider Jabulile Majola's Isitifiketi Roadshow: 16 shows, 8 ticketed performances reaching over 1,800 people, travelling 2,399km across the country including to Gqeberha, Soweto, Bloemfontein and the Midlands.
One of the FEC-supported productions, Die een wat bly by Figure of 8 Productions, premiered at Klein Karoo National Arts Festival and toured through four major festivals over eight months, where it was staged in both English and Afrikaans, generating 52 jobs and earning critical acclaim and a run at The Baxter Theatre.
This was one of six works to take a bow across South Africa’s festival stages.
Cornelia Faasen, CEO of NATi noted, “For the first time, there's visible evidence of a distributed network of opportunity rather than the siloed hub model that has previously dominated South Africa’s cultural scene. When artists can move more deliberately through a circuit of opportunities, they can invest more time and money into developing work, not only increasing the job and income benefits but ensuring audiences get a stronger product too.”
The current arts funding model delivers an estimated R1.75bn annually, allocated across national government and corporate sources annually, the money arrives through a system that is struggling to meet the demands for funding and ensure real growth for artists.
Most funding is short-term, untargeted and organised around funder timelines rather than creative needs. Outcomes are unmeasured and geography remains concentrated, resulting in impact that is genuinely opaque.
"The funding landscape is currently chaotic," says Andre le Roux, director of IKS Cultural Consulting which implements the Concerts SA programme.
"It needs to be more targeted to a particular objective to make greater impact.” This isn't criticism from outside commentators. This is an assessment from practitioners inside the system. Although the scale of the need outweighs the funding available, there is also a need to look at the mechanisms through which funding flows to ensure opportunities are sustainable and that the grants achieve their stated purpose.
The right questions change everything
Rather than simply distributing grants, the Festival Enterprise Catalyst asks different questions: What if festivals collaborated rather than competed? What if networks of cultural institutions became active circuits of exchange? What if decision-making was transparent and both artistic merit and commercial viability mattered?
The lessons emerging are methodical: leverage resources for maximum impact; maintain transparency with all partners; foster cross-festival collaboration; share skills and best practice and expand networks of stakeholders.
“The cultural sector has to move away from being fractious, insular, divided and set in our ways. Partnerships work because they require something the sector rarely practices: genuine collaboration. And its working,” says Monica Newton, CEO of the National Arts Festival.
The FEC hopes that its model can become part of a larger reimagining captured in conversations around the revised White Paper on Arts, Culture and Heritage by the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture.
Says Cornelia Faasen, “Grant funding remains vitally important, but it's joined by new mechanisms: a Creative and Cultural Industries Fund, a Catalyst Fund, Regional Funds and Investment Funds, Accelerators and Incubators.”
This represents a fundamental shift in thinking. If the current system treats creative work as a social amenity requiring subsidy, the emerging model treats it as an economic sector capable of generating sustainable activity, and each Rand as an investment in the future of the sector. The FEC pilot suggests that at least part of this new model works.
Looking ahead
The FEC's roadmap is ambitious. Year two focuses on completion and a "pay it forward" pilot from Concerts SA. Year three aims to raise additional funds and secure a second Jobs Fund grant with expanded partnerships. Years four and five envision regional and international expansion, with the model replicated across cultural institutions.
The forces impacting arts funding—political instability, economic volatility, technological disruption—aren't slowing down. Cultural institutions remain fragmented. But something has shifted.
“When a group of festivals decides to prioritise each other's success as much as their own. When transparent decision-making replaces closed-door grant processes. When a musician can tour across nine countries because of microgrants and coordinated logistics and when critical acclaim follows commercial sustainability—that's not incremental change, that's a different operating system,” says Andre le Roux.
The Festival Enterprise Catalyst's first year hasn't solved South Africa's creative economy challenges. But it has demonstrated that solutions don’t always require massive new funding.
Working together, Festivals have been able to forge stability and common purpose, unifying and strengthening the ecosystem between the festivals, and beyond, to benefit the experience of the artist and audience.
