Adebola Fayekemi Adedokun
Through its educational services and training, the museum has been successful in empowering women, especially women with special needs, wives of police officers, market women, career women, politicians etc. This track record of success gives confidence in the proposed approach of using cultural heritage as a vehicle for entrepreneurship.
It must be noted that despite all efforts by the relevant authorities to empower women, women often face severe socio-economic challenges.
However, especially in light of the current economic situation, museum experts are proposing a new approach to achieving this goal: using cultural heritage as an entrepreneurial tool.
Cultural entrepreneurship is an emerging field that explores how cultural products such as art, theater, and literature, and cultural activities such as sports, music, food, and film events, impact regional, national, and global economic growth.
This can be defined as the unique activity of establishing a cultural business and bringing to market cultural and creative products and services that embrace cultural value but also have the potential to generate economic revenue.
For example, a group of rural women can set up a pottery business, using traditional techniques to create a unique, marketable product. This can be an efficient approach given the cultural roots of the community.
Cultural entrepreneurship is valuable because it enables women involved in producing arts and crafts to express their culture and lifestyle, and more importantly, it allows them to earn a living by selling their products, thereby contributing to their household incomes and local economies.
Generally, women tend to be involved in crafts due to cultural gender norms. Making arts and crafts is often a means of self-development for women and can be a significant source of income for them.
In Nigeria’s tough economic climate, museums can play a more important role by engaging local women in cultural entrepreneurship. They can involve them in exhibiting and selling artworks and provide them with training facilities.
Museums can support women in crafts such as bead making, soap making, pottery, wood carving, mat making, sculptures, baskets, weaving and paintings and help them improve their work to international standards so that they can be sold to visitors.
Museums can play an important role in supporting female entrepreneurship by showcasing women’s creative work, collecting and preserving it in collections, and providing spaces where they can sell their work. Such active involvement by museums can inspire audiences about the potential impact of their support.
Museums can use women’s work in exhibitions and publications to highlight their creativity and involve them in training and workshops, thus involving them in museum activities.
Through the efforts of the museum’s professionals, the museum can help women working in the creative arts to develop their creativity, cultural-artistic and aesthetic sense and add greater beauty and economic value to their works.
Museums should play a role in helping these women display their wares.
Museum personnel should also contribute to communicating museum exhibits to the wider community through the Internet and other social media means.
The museum can grant licenses to this category of women to make their products available for sale and accessible to tourists visiting Nigeria and those residing overseas.
We must also recognize that one of the efforts to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is women’s empowerment, and therefore museum professionals must make every effort to support women’s entrepreneurship through culture and the arts.
Adedokun is the Head of Museum Education at the National Museum, Osogbo.
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