UNIDO · Creative Mediterranean

Creative Mediterranean was UNIDO's programme for the cultural and creative industries of the southern Mediterranean, funded by the European Union and Italian cooperation and run across seven countries and fourteen clusters. In Marrakech, the Cluster Development Agent was me.

The cluster was the Marrakech Creative Interiors Cluster: companies working in creative interiors, with a network of artisans behind them. The mandate was broad. Diagnose, plan, structure, promote, train, report. It did not say where to begin.

The visible need was visibility. The companies wanted to be seen by buyers, institutions and the press. A logo, a website and a fair stand would have answered the request as it was phrased.

The diagnosis showed a different problem. The companies were disconnected from each other. Each carried its own skills, its own market and its own risk, and none had yet a reason to act as a group. Visibility for a cluster that did not exist between its own members would have been decoration.

So I set the order of the work: make the cluster real among its members first, then make it visible from outside, then use that visibility to reach markets.

I started with the diagnosis and the strategic plan, and from there structured the cluster itself: what the members would do together and what each of them gained from it.

Around that structure I built what a cluster needs to function in public. A Marrakech Creative and Design Hub, the institutional anchor the cluster lacked. Branding and visibility for the cluster as a collective. Product development and market access work with the companies. Training. Public-private partnerships that put the cluster in front of the institutions able to support it.

The mandate also had a reporting side, which I treated as part of the work rather than an administrative cost: monitoring and evaluation, reporting to UNIDO, and capitalising the Marrakech method so it could serve the regional programme. I presented the creative industries and digital work at Creative Forum Ljubljana in April 2018 as UNIDO's digital communication and marketing expert, and spoke as a UNIDO expert at a Houna design talk in April 2017.

La Minute Créative came out of this mission. I conceived and created it as a short, human and reproducible video format: one creator, their gestures, their skills and the economic value behind them.

It was storytelling used as a cluster-development instrument. A company that cannot pay for a campaign can still be filmed at work, and a buyer who will never visit a workshop can still see what happens inside one.

UNIDO’s independent evaluation cited the video initiative of the Marrakech cluster as a promotional tool that could be replicated elsewhere in the programme. One of the films drew the interest of a national television channel. La Minute Créative has its own record in this archive.

UNIDO’s 2017 evaluation reported 30 additional jobs in the cluster, 19 formal members around a core group of 15, and a €26,000 increase in direct sales.

These are the cluster's results. The companies made the products, hired the people and closed the sales. My part was the structure, the tools and the visibility that made acting together worth their while, and the reporting that let the institution see it happen.

Marrakech sat inside a regional programme that connected creative enterprises, public institutions, designers and market-access partners. My responsibility was the Marrakech cluster. UNIDO’s country teams and regional management carried the wider programme.

The value of the institutional model was the connection between local work and a larger system. A diagnosis could become a joint action plan. A local association could speak to institutions as a collective. A communication format developed in Marrakech could serve other clusters. That is the scale at which the mission made sense.

The UNIDO years ran in parallel with my work on USAID's Career Centers in Moroccan universities: another sector, the same structural problem of separate actors who gain from each other once someone builds the link. Later, when UNITAR looked for blockchain expertise, my UNIDO background was part of why they trusted me with an institutional pilot.

La Minute Créative and the Marrakech Creative Interiors Cluster have their own records. This one holds the mission they belonged to.