GetLit Africa unveils platform of creative opportunities for African artists

By Editor

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 called GetLit Africa, Olawale Oluwadahunsi, said he decided to pioneer the platform in the African arts space, drawing from his experience as a writer, journalist and art critic, before his relocation to Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America. Oluwadahunsi addressed journalists of his innovative platform via online from his US base.

According to him, “The decision to launch this stems from my personal experience. As a journalist with National Mirror newspaper (now defunct), I was always searching for opportunities in the arts, because I realised there were so many which 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 outfit, as its activities would be graduated over time to accommodate paid-subscription of such resources and information. “GetLit is structured to evolve over time into other services,” Oluwadahubsi explained. “Aside showcasing the various opportunities in arts, we also hope to provide the necessary trainings as regards how to apply for certain grants in the arts space all over the world. Unknown to many, people still travel to the US 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 to whoever needs them.”

Olwale Oluwadahunsi

To make the platform accessible to more Africans, it has been launched in languages such as English, French, Arabic, German, Spanish and Chinese.

GetLit Africa is an all-encompassing platform that showcases global opportunities available to Africans in every area of the arts. The platform, which is currently available at www.getlitafrica.com, has interests in areas such as poetry, publishing, exhibitions, events and talent hunt. The project is driven by young Nigerians such as Olawale Oluwadahunsi (Creative Director), Isaac Idowu (Director), Oluwatosin Ajeigbe (Project Coordinator), Temitope Oke (Associate Project Coordinator), Olumide Oyekunle (Editor) and Abisola Amusan (Head of Marketing).

With multifaceted interests in the arts (poetry and art criticism), the Creative Director, Oluwadahunsi, a biochemist by training, started writing poetry as a teenager and has steadily up-scaled his passion. He is the mastermind of Poetic Mines and Fingerprints, curators of photography charity exhibitions as well as Spoken Words competitions. In 2015, he participated at the Durban Film Festival as ‘movie critic’, while in 2020 he was in New York as a delegate of United Nations Summer Youth Assembly. Recently, he was selected as a delegate to the World Bank Youth Summit.