Reinventing Africa
Building a sustainable future through art and culture for an educated and responsible Africa.
ACUNA Presentation
ACUNA is a pan-African cultural think tank that nurtures the ambition of a continent to write new narratives and take its rightful place on the world stage through the voice of its culture, with a capacity for proposals and solutions to the major challenges of Africa’s artistic and cultural development.
ACUNA aims to help build the new Africa we want, using art and culture as levers for transformation. Our cultural heritage and artistic creativity will be the pillars of this development, with education as the foundation to anchor this vision in a sustainable perspective. We position ourselves as a think tank of reference, offering support and advice to governments and regional institutions on cultural and creative industries (CCI), cultural and artistic education, cultural rights, market access and other strategic cultural issues. We believe in a united, strong, self-reliant and prosperous Africa, shaped by Africans for Africans, where cultural wealth and heritage play a central role in building an inclusive and environmentally-friendly society. ACUNA think tank aims to strengthen the link between cultural and social development, by enhancing heritage resources while preserving our historical awareness, with a new African way of thinking.
It is a space for reflection, education and advocacy, where experts, researchers, artists and cultural players come together around a common mission: to promote an Africa where culture and the cultural and creative industries (CCI) are the drivers of inclusive and sustainable socio-economic growth.
ACUNA is a term that means “thought” in the Akan language. The Akan are a conglomeration of peoples living mainly in the territories of the present-day republics of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.
The ACUNA pan-African think tank draws its inspiration from the African Union’s Agenda 2063 ‘to have an integrated, prosperous, peaceful Africa, governed by its own means and citizens and representing a dynamic force on the international scene’, but also the African Union’s Charter for African Cultural Renaissance to achieve ‘at the global level, the affirmation of African identities illustrates African dignity and freedom and thus expresses African values and the contribution of Africa and the African diaspora to the building of universal civilisation’.
It also resonates with the 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, one of whose aims is ‘to strengthen international cooperation and solidarity in a spirit of partnership in order, in particular, to increase the capacities of developing countries to protect and promote the diversity of cultural expressions’.
ACUNA: Pan-African Cultural Think Tank
ACUNA Think Tank will create a framework for fruitful exchanges between civil society, the private sector and African governments. It aspires to be an all-African voice for the socio-economic and ecological development of Africa, with a focus on culture, and seeks to enhance African heritage and identity.
Our mission is to unite the continent’s driving forces, including experts, researchers, artists and cultural actors, to generate innovative ideas and concrete solutions. ACUNA positions itself as a force for proposal and advocacy, in order to promote Africa’s rich cultural heritage and CCIs, strengthen social development and encourage sustainable ecological actions through Education and vigorous cultural policies on the African continent.
