Beyond Detty December: Creative Economy as Infrastructure
There comes a point where celebration stops being enough.
Detty December has done what it needed to do.
It proved demand.
It proved scale.
It proved that African culture can move people, money, and global attention at speed.
But demand is not an economy.
And attention, on its own, is not the work.
What happens after the crowds leave is where the real story begins.
For years, December has followed the same pattern.
Flights surge.
Hotels sell out.
Clubs overflow.
Timelines explode.
Then January comes — and the value has already left.
The IP.
The data.
The leverage.
The long-term upside.
What remains is memory, not infrastructure.
That is not an accident.
It is the predictable outcome of building moments without systems.
Beyond Detty December was created as an intentional interruption.
Not another event.
Not another panel for applause.
But a working room to ask the harder questions that rarely make it onto festival stages.
Questions like:
Who owns the platforms after the festivals leave?
Where do local operators actually sit in the value chain?
What systems remain when the spotlight moves on?
How does one month of global demand translate into year-round livelihoods?
When Ghana opened its doors in 2019 during the Year of Return, the shift was not symbolic, it was systemic.
Visa-on-arrival.
Institutional alignment.
A clear signal that the diaspora was not visiting, but returning.
That alignment changed behaviour.
People didn’t just attend.
They connected.
They returned.
They invested differently.
That is the difference between hosting culture and building an economy around it.
The purpose of this roundtable is not to make December bigger.
It is to make it structural.
To explore what it means to treat the creative economy as infrastructure — with ownership, governance, pathways, and reinvestment built in.
Because countries that win long-term do not rely on vibes.
They design systems where culture compounds.
This conversation is especially urgent now.
Africa’s greatest asset is not just its creativity — it is its youth.
And yet too many talented people are still forced to leave in order to be validated, funded, or taken seriously.
That is not a talent problem.
It is a systems problem.
And systems can be redesigned.
Beyond Detty December exists to move the conversation from visibility to value creation.
From applause to ownership.
From moments to institutions.
Because if culture is powerful — and it is —
then the question is no longer whether it should be taken seriously.
The question is:
Who builds what remains when the attention moves on?
—
Dr. King SMADE
Journal Entry
Accra, December
