From Policy Ambition to Delivery Capacity: What the Dialogue Revealed
When Africa Creatives Alliance launched The Delivery Gap – Governance Pathways for the Creative Economy in September 2026, the starting proposition was deliberately straightforward: across Africa and beyond, the creative economy is increasingly recognised in policies, strategies, legislation and national development ambitions. Yet the economic and social outcomes expected from that ambition are not advancing at the same pace.
The question, therefore, is changing.It is no longer only: Do we have a creative economy policy? Increasingly, it is: Does the system surrounding that policy have the capacity to deliver?
The launch brought this question into dialogue with perspectives from the World Bank, the African Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF), implementation research and national government. While contributors approached the issue from different institutional and professional perspectives, a striking degree of convergence emerged.
The discussion reinforced the central premise of The Delivery Gap: the challenge is increasingly not simply to generate greater policy ambition, but to strengthen the systems through which that ambition can be translated into outcomes. It also surfaced several important implications for governments, development partners and creative-economy ecosystems.
1. The policy gap is increasingly a delivery gap
A central proposition of The Delivery Gap is that the starting point is no longer necessarily policy absence. In many countries, considerable policy architecture already exists. Creative economy ambitions are appearing across cultural policy, national development strategies, MSME and industrial frameworks, trade agendas, legislation and institutional reforms.
This represents important progress. But more policy does not automatically produce more coherence. As the creative economy becomes recognised across government, more ministries, agencies, programmes, laws and financing mechanisms become involved. Because the creative economy is transversal, every additional intervention also creates interfaces that need to function.
The result is something of a paradox: the more successfully the creative economy enters government agendas, the greater the need for coordination and delivery capacity.
This diagnosis was strongly echoed by Vara Vemuru of the World Bank, who shifted the question from whether creative economy policies exist towards whether institutions are capable of implementing them effectively. From a World Bank operational perspective, she described delivery as depending on coherent roles and responsibilities, coordination across ministries and levels of government, and connections between creators, investors, intermediaries and civil society.
“The quick question is not only, do we have a creative economy policy, but do we have a creative economy delivery system capable of turning that policy into economic opportunity?” — Vara Vemuru, World Bank
The Kenyan experience brought the same issue into a national government context. Kiprop Lagat, Director of Culture in Kenya's State Department for Culture, Arts and Heritage, described a country in which the creative economy has received increasing policy recognition, while responsibilities simultaneously extend across culture, trade, MSME development, intellectual property, skills and markets. The result can be institutional overlap, duplication and difficulties in coordination.
His intervention pointed to a critical shift: rather than simply producing additional policies, greater attention needs to be given to operationalising existing frameworks and translating them into tangible outcomes, including jobs, livelihoods and economic value.
This distinction is fundamental. Policy adoption is not the end of policymaking. It is the beginning of a delivery chain—from ambition to policy, mandate, resources, coordination, implementation, reach and ultimately outcomes. A delivery gap can emerge at every interface along that chain.
2. The critical gaps are often between things that already exist
One of the strongest areas of convergence during the discussion concerned where the delivery problem actually sits.
The delivery gap is often not an empty space where nothing exists. It is the space between things that already exist.
At the same time, an important question raised during the discussion was whether focusing on delivery risks moving too quickly past an earlier challenge: is the creative economy sufficiently understood and prioritised within government in the first place?
This remains a significant issue. In many contexts, there is still uncertainty about what constitutes the creative economy, why it matters economically, where responsibility for it sits within government and which interventions should be prioritised. Considerable work has been undertaken over the past decade around awareness raising, terminology, sector mapping and policy development, but understanding and institutional positioning remain uneven.
Recognition therefore still matters—but it is no longer the whole challenge.
Prioritisation also depends on governments being able to make choices about where scarce public resources should be directed. One potentially important instrument is national level economic projection work that moves beyond measuring the sector's current contribution and asks a more decision-relevant question: what additional economic value, employment, enterprise growth or diversification could reasonably be generated through particular types and levels of investment? Such analysis can help governments understand not only what the creative economy contributes today, but what specific investments and enabling interventions could potentially unlock.
Yet stronger positioning and better economic evidence do not remove the delivery challenge. A government can recognise the creative economy as a priority, adopt a strategy and allocate resources, while still struggling to translate those decisions into outcomes if the necessary delivery infrastructure does not function.
Recognition, policy and delivery should therefore not be understood as a rigid sequence. A country may need to strengthen the economic and institutional case for the creative economy while simultaneously improving the functioning of the systems through which existing policies, programmes and institutions deliver. Indeed, examining delivery can itself reveal what government needs to prioritise next.
This is important to the systemic perspective developed in The Delivery Gap. A delivery-oriented approach does not have to begin with the creation of a new policy. It can begin with the delivery challenge itself and examine what must function in practice to address it. This can reveal different situations: policy may exist but not be operationalised; mandates may exist but remain disconnected; necessary functions may be performed without adequate institutional recognition; or the analysis may reveal a genuine policy or regulatory gap.
The point is not to prejudge that policy is the problem, but to follow the system and the evidence to identify where the delivery constraint actually sits.
If the first challenge is making the creative economy visible to government, the next is making the delivery system visible to itself.
A country may have capable institutions, committed officials, legislation, entrepreneurship programmes, financing instruments and creative organisations. But no single institution controls the complete pathway through which creative activity becomes sustainable economic activity.
A ministry responsible for culture cannot independently solve access to finance. A trade ministry cannot independently address copyright monetisation. An MSME agency cannot resolve every specific constraint affecting creative enterprises.
The governance challenge therefore frequently resides between mandates, institutions, resources, programmes and the ecosystem actors expected to use them.
Vemuru reinforced this from an operational perspective: delivery gaps can arise between institutions, programmes and financing mechanisms that already exist because responsibilities remain unclear, information does not flow or connections are weak.
Suzanne Duffour's work in the emerging field of Implementation Intelligence, developed through the Implementation Intelligence Research Programme, brought another dimension to the same problem. Her intervention focused on the importance of making the architecture of implementation visible. Systems contain functions, actors and relationships, but the coordination layer connecting them is frequently insufficiently described or understood.
This produces an important methodological implication: before creating another intervention, it may be necessary first to describe the implementation architecture of the system.
What needs to function? Who currently performs those functions? What condition are they in? Which relationships work? Which do not? Where is responsibility explicit, and where is it simply assumed?
Duffour S. also cautioned against treating functions as simply present or absent. In practice, the states observed within an implementation can be described along a five-state gradient: absent, emerging, partial, established and saturated. Saturated does not mean fully achieved; it describes a state in which additional elements of the same kind may begin to work against the implementation rather than support it.
This moves ecosystem analysis beyond producing stakeholder lists. The relevant unit of analysis becomes functions, relationships, coordination mechanisms and their capacity to deliver.
3. Delivery capacity is itself something that can be invested in
Perhaps one of the most significant implications to emerge from the dialogue concerns how we understand capacity.
Creative economy development frequently includes capacity-building programmes, often focused on training entrepreneurs, practitioners or public officials. Training remains important. But Abdrahamane Dicko of the African Capacity Building Foundation argued that sustainable implementation requires a considerably wider understanding of capacity.
A trained individual cannot necessarily deliver differently if they return to an institution characterised by unclear mandates, inadequate resources, fragmented accountability or processes that have not changed.
From ACBF's perspective, institutional capacity encompasses clarity of mandates and accountability, leadership, organisational capability, resources, functioning delivery systems and the ability to build and manage relationships beyond government. Planning, budgeting, procurement, data, monitoring, coordination, learning and accountability are therefore themselves components of implementation capacity.
“The question is not simply how we train people, but rather: can the organisation perform this function consistently after the training?” — Abdrahamane Dicko, African Capacity Building Foundation*
This distinction changes how capacity-building success might be assessed. Rather than asking only how many people have been trained, the more consequential question becomes: what can the institution now deliver that it could not deliver before, and can it continue to do so over time?
The discussion also took this argument beyond public institutions.
Vemuru raised a parallel question for development partners: if delivery systems matter, what should we invest in?
Supporting creative entrepreneurs and enterprises remains essential. But so does strengthening the environment surrounding them: institutions, intermediaries, market intelligence, coordination and connections to markets. If enterprises cannot access markets, monetise intellectual property or reach appropriate business support and finance, simply increasing the availability of capital will not resolve the underlying constraint.
This leads to a wider proposition:
Delivery capacity is itself a productive asset—and therefore something governments and development partners can deliberately invest in.
For the creative economy, this could represent an important evolution in the investment conversation. The question becomes not only how much capital reaches creative businesses, but whether sufficient investment is being made in the systems that allow those businesses to create, reach markets, capture value and grow.
4. Intermediation is part of the productive infrastructure
This connects directly to another area of strong agreement: the role of intermediary organisations and intermediary functions.
Creative hubs, incubators, accelerators, makerspaces, associations and other intermediaries are frequently understood as support organisations operating around the creative economy.
The discussion pointed towards a more significant role.
Intermediaries can connect practitioners and enterprises to institutions, skills, finance, markets and opportunities. They can translate public programmes into something creative businesses can actually access. They can convene actors, generate market intelligence and identify implementation barriers close to where they occur.
Crucially, the relationship can also operate in the other direction. Because intermediaries work close to enterprises and markets, they can carry knowledge about implementation failures, market realities and emerging needs back into institutions and policy processes.
From this perspective, intermediation is not primarily about what type of organisation an actor is. It is about the function being performed: translating, connecting, enabling and coordinating.
Vemuru strongly reinforced this point through World Bank operational experience, highlighting intermediary functions including market intelligence, stakeholder convening, capability-building and connecting firms to markets.
“Intermediaries are therefore not peripheral actors. They're integral to the delivery infrastructure linking policy to practice.” — Vara Vemuru, World Bank
She further emphasised that their proximity to enterprises and markets enables intermediaries to generate ecosystem intelligence that can—and should—feed back into programme and policy design.
This has implications for how governments and development partners design creative-economy interventions. Strengthening enterprises while leaving the connective infrastructure around them weak risks repeatedly addressing individual symptoms without strengthening the system that produces them.
5. From measuring outputs to understanding the system that produces them
The discussion ultimately points towards a broader change in perspective. Creative economy measurement understandably focuses on outputs: jobs, enterprise growth, exports, investment, participation, livelihoods and contribution to GDP.
Those outcomes remain essential. But if outcomes are persistently weaker than policy ambition suggests they should be, we also need to examine the capacity of the systems expected to produce them.
Are mandates clear? Do institutions have the resources and authority to fulfil them? Do finance mechanisms accommodate the realities of creative business models? Can intellectual property be effectively protected and monetised? Can enterprises reach domestic and international markets? Are intermediary functions present and sufficiently capable? Does information move from implementation back into programme and policy design?
And critically: do the relationships between these different parts of the system actually work?
Duffour S.'s call to begin with a neutral description of the architecture is relevant here: understand what exists, what functions different actors perform, the condition of those functions, whether they are fulfilled, how they connect, and where dependencies remain unassigned.
A question from the audience pushed this issue further: how do we know whether governance and policy have actually translated into functioning delivery, rather than simply measuring eventual economic outputs?
Consider intellectual property as collateral. A law may establish that IP assets can be used as collateral, but the existence of that legal provision tells us relatively little about whether a creative enterprise can actually obtain finance against those assets. Is there recognised professional capacity to value the IP? Do financial institutions know how to assess those valuations? Are appropriate lending or guarantee mechanisms available? Is there a functioning market through which the asset could ultimately be monetised or realised? Can creative enterprises formalise and document their IP appropriately? And critically, are the actors responsible for these different functions actually connected?
This illustrates an important distinction between policy existence and delivery functionality. The ultimate test of implementation is not simply whether the components of a system exist, but whether the functions and relationships between them work well enough to create a viable pathway from policy intent to value creation.
This is one of the purposes of the Relational Stakeholder Framework (RSF) developed in The Delivery Gap. Rather than monitoring implementation only through downstream economic outputs, the RSF examines whether the system required to produce those outcomes is actually functioning. The evidence lies in the functioning of the system itself: whether necessary functions exist; whether responsibilities are clear; whether relevant actors have the capacity and resources to perform them; whether coordination mechanisms operate; whether information moves across the system; whether intermediary functions connect institutions with creative enterprises; and ultimately whether an enterprise can navigate that system and obtain the intended benefit.
This makes the delivery gap more precisely observable. A missing IP-valuation function represents one type of gap. An institution with a mandate but insufficient capacity represents another. Two capable actors whose functions should connect but who do not work together reveal a relational delivery gap. A financing mechanism that formally exists but cannot in practice be accessed by creative enterprises reveals another.
Learning and adaptation can then be grounded in evidence from the functioning of the system itself: Are previously missing functions now being performed? Are relationships working differently? Are bottlenecks being removed? Is the policy becoming usable in practice? The answers can feed directly into further adaptation of the delivery arrangements.
This is distinct from, but complementary to, the broader question of governance readiness. At macro level, The Delivery Gap proposes a Creative Economy Governance Maturity Framework examining five interdependent dimensions: terminology and conceptual coherence; relational and interconnected governance; adaptive and learning governance; ecosystem development and enabling infrastructure; and the business-enabling environment. It is conceived not as a country ranking or performance index, but as a diagnostic and capacity development approach.
The distinction is useful: the governance maturity lens asks about the wider capacity of the governance environment, while the RSF asks whether a particular delivery system or sub-system can actually function.
Economic outcomes remain essential, but they are further downstream. To understand whether policy is moving towards those outcomes, we need to ask not only whether a policy exists or whether an economic indicator has moved, but whether the functions, actors and relationships required to turn policy into value are actually operating—and follow the evidence through the system.
Kenya's experience illustrates why such analysis matters. Lagat described an environment in which policy ambition, institutions, skills and creative activity all exist, while informality, fragmented mandates, data limitations, financing constraints and institutional overlaps continue to affect the ability of the ecosystem to translate that potential into economic outcomes.
The issue, then, is not necessarily whether the ingredients exist. It is increasingly whether they function together as a delivery system.
From ambition to capacity
The dialogue did not suggest that Africa needs to move away from creative economy policymaking. Quite the opposite. The growing recognition of culture and creativity within national development agendas represents significant progress.
What it suggests is that this progress has brought the creative economy to a new stage of the governance conversation.
The question is no longer only how to secure recognition, formulate strategies or establish programmes. These remain important, particularly where the creative economy is still insufficiently understood or prioritised, but they increasingly need to be accompanied by another question: how do we build the institutional, relational and intermediary capacity that allows those ambitions to function in practice?
One further lesson from the discussion is that this transition does not necessarily have to begin at full scale. In her closing reflections, Vemuru pointed to the value of good analytics, stakeholder consultation, coordination mechanisms and proof of concept, starting with approaches that demonstrate what can work and then building institutional ownership and scale around them.
This may be particularly important for the creative economy. The task ahead is not to design an entirely new system from scratch. In many contexts, much of the system already exists.
The opportunity is to make it visible, understand where it does and does not function, strengthen the relationships between its parts, and invest in its capacity to deliver.
Download “The Delivery Gap - Governance Pathways for the Creative Economy” here
Johanna Kouzmine-Karavaïeff
Director of Research & Creative Economy Systems, Africa Creatives Alliance
