CARIBBEAN : Arts Festival

The St Lucia Arts Festival Project has worked to expand the performance and employment opportunities for artists, technicians, businesses and service providers involved in arts and culture by establishing three festival events and a festival venue. Many of the direct beneficiaries are young people who are semi or unskilled and thus sporadically employed.

Music and cultural festivals are a proven formula for attracting the kind of Caribbean tourism development that also involves the local community. Tourists and international media provide invaluable exposure of local tourism products while attending tourists tend to spend money locally rather than on an inclusive package.

While the project management and technical teams were established in early 2005, there were initial problems with both venue construction and financing so that this was taken over by a local company, with the result that the St Lucia Festival Company took over a lease of the festival venue rather than owning it outright.

A pilot event was held in the first half of 2005 and feedback from this was channelled into a reworking of the original event concepts for dance, performance, poetry, prose, contemporary music, art and comedy, as well as sponsorship packages. Since then comedy and writing workshops have also been held.

The project's first big event, Kalulu Musical Festival, was a three-day event in December 2005 but, while the marketing and standard were high, attendances were low. The second Kalulu Fesival in 2006 attracted a larger audience but numbers were still short of the intended target.

For more information contact BLCF fund manager, the Emerging Markets Group at this address