Participant-Centred Analysis of Transformative Learning Outcomes in the Creative Arts Business and Intellectual Property Workshops in Ghana

The creative arts industry in Ghana, while rich in potential, is constrained by a critical knowledge gap in business management and intellectual property (IP) rights. This study moves beyond a simple assessment of knowledge transfer to provide a participant-centered analysis of a multi-year workshop series (2019-2024) designed to address this gap. Framed by an integrated theoretical lens of Mezirow’s Transformative Learning Theory, Lave and Wenger’s Communities of Practice, and Freirean Critical Pedagogy, this research investigates how the workshops fostered not only cognitive understanding but also profound shifts in perspective, social learning, and critical agency. Using a mixed-methods approach, data was collected from 462 post-workshop surveys and 12 in-depth interviews with a diverse cohort of artists, industry stakeholders, and students. The analysis, guided by our theoretical framework, reveals that the workshops served as a catalyst for perspective transformation, disrupting participants’ preconceptions and enabling them to reconceive their creative work as valuable, protectable assets. The findings demonstrate that the workshops’ primary impact lay in this powerful combination of transformative, situated, and emancipatory learning. This study concludes that sustainable capacity building in the Global South creative economies requires educational interventions that are designed not just to inform, but to transform identities, build collaborative networks, and critically empower participants. Recommendations are offered for designing future workshops that systematically leverage these theoretical principles to maximize their relevance and long-term impact on the Ghanaian creative sector.