British Council’s Festival Connect Fund 2024/5

Opportunity type:  Grant

For:  Festival Organisers

Deadline: 31/03/24, 11:00 pm GMT

Rewards: Up to £40,000

Location Eligibility: Some African countries

About this opportunity

British Council has launched their Festival Connect Fund, granting funds to festival organisers to help them organise events in Africa. The Festival Connect Fund seeks grant proposals from festivals across various art forms such as Creative Technology, Dance, Film, Literature, Music, Theatre, and/or multi-disciplinary arts.

They acknowledge the broad diversity of festivals and in this regard welcome applications from festival organisations operating either annual, triennial, or biennial festival programmes both face-to-face and online.

Festivals can apply for the following activities:

• commissioning, co-production, development, or presentation of new or remounted work from across countries in Africa and internationally. These may include live/in-person and digital components.
• community engagement programme /arts events alongside the festival
• other associated activities including mobility and travel to support festival development, partnership building etc. that support the festival programme.
• administrative and technical costs towards managing/producing the festival, up to 30% of the grant amount applied for.

 What can this look like?

• Programming of young, emerging artists between African festivals
• Incubation of existing art (e.g. a piece that already exists that would benefit from further development)
• Cross programming, co-production, and/or curation of work
•  Experimentation between festivals/artists

 You may also apply for funding for activity costs that your festival expects to incur.

These might include:

• Artists’ fees (including performance fees)
• Venue-rental costs
• Staff costs (e.g. administrative, technical, and front-of-house support directly related to the festival)
• Audience engagement – activity carried out to develop ongoing relationships with current and new audiences.
• Marketing and publicity costs
• Technical and production costs
• Travel costs and expenses for artists.
• A contribution to the festival programme archiving.

 This fund is not open to the following:

• non-arts festivals (e.g. food and wine festivals, wellness festivals, carnivals/parades) or arts activity within non-arts festivals

All festival activity should be undertaken between May 2024 and April 2025.

Rewards

A total of £200,000 is available for festivals in the eligible countries to support collaborations, exchanges, mobility, and showcasing on scales ranging from £ 10,000 – £ 40,000 maximum per application.

Eligibility

Entry Fee

Free.

How to Apply

Apply using the link: Festival Connect Fund.

All questions regarding this fund should be sent to the online enquiry form on their website .