The Swedish Institute´s projects Creative Force and Sweden@

The Swedish Institute works on behalf of the Government to ensure that Sweden achieves international goals in a number of key areas. Its mission spans over foreign policy, development and reform collaboration and education policy.

Creative Force Africa and the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) supports collaborative projects with the overall objective of strengthening democratisation and freedom of expression in the target countries. These aims are to be achieved through mutual learning processes and sustainable networks between organisations and agents of change who work with either culture or the media to bring about change.  Creative Force is financed by a Swedish Government special initiative, namely the Swedish Results strategy for special initiatives for human rights and democratisation, administered by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Sida. The primary target group for the Creative Force programme is agents of change and opinion-makers who, through culture or the media, work with creative processes to strengthen democratisation and human rights. These can be organisations and groups of cultural actors and journalists, other actors within media organisations as well as human rights defenders and political activists, women’s rights groups, youth organisations or other relevant actors who work to increase democratisation and freedom of expression.

Sweden@  is a long-term project run by the Swedish Institute with focus on culture and creative industries. The workprocess focus on co-creation between Swedish and local actors over a longer period. It creates new meeting places and processes that are a new way of working with Sweden. The working process moves away from the traditional donor/beneficiary relationship and instead works on shared challenges and solutions that enable planning ahead and an opportunity to create synergies between the paticipating countries. Zambia, South Africa, Rwanda and Kenya has been the country partners in the projekt the last five years.