GetLit Africa Unveils Platform Of Opportunities For African Artists

 
Mary Nnah
 
A new Africa-wide platform designed to showcase opportunities available worldwide for artists of African origin has been unveiled.

Announcing the availability of the platform, the Creative Director of the initiative, Olawale Oluwadahunsi, said he decided to pioneer this in the African art space, drawing from his experience as a writer, journalist and art critic, before his relocation to Atlanta Georgia, United States.

According to him, “The decision to launch this stems from my personal experience. As a journalist with the National Mirror newspaper, I was always searching for opportunities in the arts because I realised there were so many that people did not know about. With such opportunities, I was able to travel to South Africa on an all-expense paid trip by the Durban Film Festival as a film critic. Those were the rewards for the weekly articles I was doing as a film and art critic in the newspaper then. So there are several opportunities in writing, photography, poetry, visual arts and music. That is essentially what inspired GetLit Africa. It is an all-encompassing opportunities platform, targeting Africans in the arts, who are seeking bigger opportunities available worldwide”.

He further explained that GetLit Africa will run both as a not-for-profit organisation as well as a business, as its activities would be graduated over time to accommodate paid subscriptions to such resources and information.  “GetLit is structured to evolve into other services. Aside from showcasing the various opportunities in arts, we also hope to provide the necessary training as regards how to apply for certain grants in the arts space all over the world.  Unknown to many, people still travel to the USA on fully paid scholarships, but one requires the right link and information to know how all these are processed. GetLit will be availing such services”, he said.
To make the platform accessible to more Africans, it has been launched in languages such as English, French, Arabic, German, Spanish and Chinese.