Niger intensifies efforts to safeguard its living heritage
"Joking relationships constitute a social practice performed amongst ethnolinguistic communities and groups and individuals through expressions and games to regulate social relationships and to promote fraternity, solidarity, conviviality, etc." ©Tahirou MAYAKI
The Government of Niger has launched a large-scale capacity-building programme for the safeguarding of its intangible cultural heritage. The launch took place during an official ceremony at the Oumarou Ganda Cultural Centre in the capital Niamey on 10 November 2014.
The event also marked the opening of a five-days Training workshop on the implementation of the 2003 Convention on the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage that gathered professionals of the Ministry of Culture from Niamey and the eight regions of the country, as well as scholars, civil society workers and journalists.
"Niger has an incredibly rich intangible heritage, but the country, as many others, needs to develop national capacities to identify and safeguard this heritage for future generations", says David Stehl, Culture Programme Specialist of the UNESCO Dakar office. He adds that capacity-building is imperative both within public institutions and among the main actors of civil society and communities, which is exactly the aim of the new programme.
The authorities of Niger are well aware of this, as pointed out by the Secretary-General of the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Leisure, Mr Moustapha Maï. He stressed in his intervention that "despite all the efforts made so far for the revitalization of expressions and traditional knowledge, the inventory, sustainable heritage management and the transmission to the youth remain major concerns in our country".
The capacity-building programme now underway has been made possible by a generous financial contribution of Spain to the Intangible Heritage Fund and has been developed within the framework of UNESCO's global capacity building strategy.
The programme is implemented in partnership with the National Directorate of Cultural Heritage and Museums of Niger until late 2015. It will focus on the organisation of another training workshop dedicated to community-based inventory making, followed by two field pilot activities for the inventorying of the intangible heritage in two selected communities. This will lay the ground work and experience for a broader, country-wide inventory making initiative.
Such an inventory is of major importance to the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage.
And indeed, "inventories, apart from taking stock of intangible heritage, can create a synergy between the stakeholders and put communities at the heart of the process", states M. Sidi Traoré. He was one of this workshop's facilitators and initiator of a national ICH inventory project in Burkina Faso that has received major financial support from the Intangible Cultural Heritage Fund in 2013.
The week dedicated to the safeguarding of the intangible heritage closed on Saturday 15 November 2014 with a consultation meeting which gathered cultural heritage and legal experts, as well as policy makers with a view to setting a road map to the revision of the national law on cultural heritage.
<- Back to: All news