Meetings on intangible cultural heritage (co-)organized by UNESCO

Incorporating intangible heritage in education ‘a win-win situation’

Co-organized by the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Section and the International Institute for Capacity Building in Africa, a roundtable event on ‘Learning with Intangible Cultural Heritage in Education’ took place in the context of the eleventh session of the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Video recording of the event: Original

During her opening statement, moderator Jyoti Hosagrahar, Director of UNESCO’s Culture Sector Division for Creativity, noted that ‘incorporating intangible cultural heritage in education is a win-win situation for education and culture and can make a significant contribution to achieving sustainable development goal 4 and its targets such as peace education and global citizenship’.

The Director emphasized that the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage highlights transmission of intangible cultural heritage through formal and non-formal education as part of the proposed safeguarding measures.

Yumiko Yokozeki, Director of the International Institute for Capacity Building in Africa observed that: ‘learning with intangible cultural heritage leads us to respect each other and helps us “learn to live together” – one of the four pillars of learning’.

After remarks from the co-organizers, Mahama Ouedraogo from the African Union Commission emphasized the clear linkages between culture and education and their importance for the Agenda 2063: The Future We Want for Africa. Panelists then discussed a range of on the ground experiences from Belize, Uganda and Pakistan.

Learning with intangible heritage

An innovative UNESCO project on learning with intangible heritage for a sustainable future in four countries in Asia was presented by UNESCO facilitator Sajida Vandal, who spoke on her experience coordinating the project in Pakistan. The project underlined that we need to promote learning with and not only learning about intangible cultural heritage, if we want to foster transmission. Ms Vandal shared the message that ‘infusion of existing subjects with intangible cultural heritage was something teachers accepted and perceived as the best approach’.

Susanne Schnuttgen, Chief of the Capacity-Building and Heritage Policy Unit in the Intangible Cultural Heritage Section, pointed out that ‘the innovative part of what panelists said is that you can integrate intangible cultural heritage without an overhaul of the curricular system’. Incorporating intangible heritage in education can happen at the school level to improve learning and teaching processes within existing curricular.

Reconnecting schools and communities

All the speakers showed how incorporating intangible cultural heritage in schools reconnects the school with the community and strengthens a sense of belonging among the learners and teachers.

In Belize, educational materials were developed based on inventories done in tandem with schools and communities. Nigel Encalada, Director of Belize’s Institute for Social and Cultural Research of the National Institute of Culture and History, described that ‘the positives are when you produce the education materials with the communities, and the children see themselves and their grandparents in the materials. That is a source of pleasure. It provides the opportunity for the survival of the heritage into the future.’

The experience in Uganda has also been very positive according to John De Coninck from the Cross-Cultural Foundation of Uganda: ‘Young people are yearning to reconnect with their heritage. They don’t necessarily know how to do it, and schools are a useful mechanism to allow this to take place.’

Working together for quality education

A key message from the event was that intangible cultural heritage provides content and methods and fosters the relevance and quality of education, while education provides important spaces for transmission. Both of the co-organizers expressed their intention to continue their work on this topic: ‘we know that we have to work together from the education and the culture field in order to really make this a mutually beneficial relationship’.

This training workshop facilitated by UNESCO Tanzania with expert support from UNESCO accredited ICH trainer, Deirdre Prins-Solani was held between 21 November – 30 November. Its objective was to build the capacity of staff members within the Ministry of Culture, Sport and Information in;(i) providing an overview of the UNESCO 2003 Convention, its key principles, spirit and State Party obligations, the ICH Convention and sustainable development and most importantly, inventorying as a safeguarding measure.

A three-day workshop on intangible cultural heritage and sustainable development, with implications for policy and programme development, was
held in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan. As part of the global capacity-building strategy under the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, the UNESCO Office in Almaty had carried out a series of activities to strengthen capacities for the implementation of the Convention at the national level in four countries in Central Asia, including Kazakhstan. Most of these activities were carried out under the project period 2012-16), supported by contributions from the Kingdom of Norway to the Intangible Heritage Fund.
During the project period, Kazakhstan authorities elaborated and adopted several key documents related to intangible cultural heritage, including the ‘Conception on the Safeguarding and Development of Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Republic of Kazakhstan’ in 2013, and the ‘Conception on
Cultural Policy for 2015-2050’ and its Action Plan in 2014. In addition, a working group of parliamentarians was created and is currently working on
revisions to culture-related laws.

Nepal has more than 100 ethnic/caste groups, each with its own and unique culture. The 2011 census identified 123 spoken languages. Nepal’s rich cultural heritage, evolved over centuries, largely manifests itself in music and dance; arts and traditional crafts; oral traditions, folklore and folktales; spiritual belief and religions; festivals and celebrations, and rituals and social practices.
Aware of the importance of the intangible cultural heritage (ICH), Nepal ratified the 2003 Convention1 in 2010 recognizing that the living traditions are a central part of the country’s collective inheritance and adopted a ‘national cultural policy 2067’, which inter alia includes a reference to the identification, research, promotion, protection and management of intangible cultural heritage. It also acknowledges the important unifying role of ICH among the diverse and numerous ethnic minorities and indigenous groups. Nevertheless, Nepal struggles to identify and recognize the enriching elements as traditions, customs, religious practices, festivities. There has been no independent ministry to develop and manage the culture sector.
Over the last years, Nepal’s Ministry of Culture and UNESCO Office in Kathmandu have worked closely in organizing three UNESCO standard training workshops on the implementation of the 2003 Convention (April 2012), community-based identification and inventorying of ICH (January 2013) and preparing nomination files to the UNESCO ICH Lists (September 2013). These were carried out within the framework of UNESCO regional capacity building project made possible through the generous financial support from the Government of Japan.
Therefore, building on the activities already undertaken, the UNESCO Office in Kathmandu consulted with Nepal’s Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation and identified a capacity building workshop on developing plans for safeguarding the intangible cultural heritage (hereinafter referred to as SAFE workshop) as most timely for Nepal to benefit from.
The proposed SAFE workshop is the fourth to be held in Nepal among the series of specifically designed capacity building workshops developed within the framework of UNESCO’s global capacity building strategy that aims at creating institutional and professional environments for enhancing capacities worldwide for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage.
The SAFE workshop will be held from 21 to 25 November 2016 following the newly developed training, combining the use of interactive scenarios and role-playing games and drawing upon the dynamic network of UNESCO-trained facilitators. Two facilitators who already delivered three capacity-building services in Nepal will be conducting the SAFE workshop due to their familiarization with the local context that will enable better adaptation of the materials as well as better understanding of the contributions of participants to the discussions in order to be better able to guide them.
The Ministry of Culture has given approval to co-organize the event as the main national implementation partner. The current workshop is being supported by the International Training Centre for Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Asia-Pacific Region under the auspices of UNESCO (CRIHAP).
The workshop will provide knowledge required for the development of safeguarding plans through review of the Convention’s key concepts, participants’ engagement in an interactive role-playing game, case studies, discussions and field exercise that can be used to improve competencies needed for developing safeguarding plans. The workshop is also expected to explore many related questions and sharing of the participants’ own experiences of ICH. The participants will be such that a new group of diverse representations from communities, governmental and non-governmental organizations involved in safeguarding the intangible heritage combine with a segment of former participants coming from Tharu, Jirel, and Pahari, Dhimal etc. backgrounds who will come handy in supporting this workshop through their experience, expertise and commitments.

This workshop is an activity of a two-year (2014-2016) project financed by UNESCO/Japan Fund-in-Trust, to support effective implementation of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in Nigeria. The objective of the workshop is to develop the capacities of the local community members through community-based inventorying training.

The workshop was facilitated by a UNESCO-trained facilitator Silverse Anami.

A total of 15 practitioners participated at the workshop and 10 were selected to conduct a six-month pilot inventorying of intangible cultural heritage in Oyo state.

Documents

• Agenda: Spanish
• List of participants: Spanish

Institutional capacity building workshop for the implementation of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Heritage was organized in Ndjamena, Chad, from October 31 to November 2, by the National Commission, the Ministry of Tourism Development, Culture and Craft and the regional UNESCO office. The workshop was co-facilitated by the Culture specialist of the UNESCO office in Yaoundé and the regional expert, Mr. Jean-Omer NATADY.

Some fifty people took part in the workshop that was held is the National Museum in Ndjamena. There were representative from the Ministry of Tourism Development, Culture and Crafts, from the Ministry of Environment, from Ndjamena University, and from the National Radio and Television Office, some of the young people who attended the regional youth forum on ICH in Brazzaville, the National Youth Advisory Council, the National Commission and the Delegations from the provincial Ministry of Culture.

This workshop was an opportunity for intercultural exchanges between the trainers and the institutions responsible for culture in Chad. The field visit to the site of Gaoui and more precisely in the Kotoko chiefdom where women make pottery was an occasion to insist on the importance of transmission, the communities’ role and on the fact that in accordance to Articles 11 and 12 of the 2003 Convention, the objective of the inventory is to contribute to the safeguarding and the updating of ICH elements.

Among the results, we can note that the fifty people who took part in the workshop (amongst whom were officials from the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Environment) have gained a better knowledge of the 2003 Convention and now know the difference between Objects and Element and are conscious of the role and implications of inventories.

Recommendations have been made to Chad and to UNESCO:

To Chad:

• Give sufficient resources to the directorate responsible for protection, preservation and safeguarding of the national heritage to inventory the representative elements of intangible cultural heritage in the country;
  
• Train culture professionals in the field of intangible cultural heritage
  
• Commit to contribute financially to the international organization

To UNESCO

• Continue to support Chad to strengthen the capacities of professionals of intangible cultural heritage to safeguard and to value the Chadian heritage
  
• Train the Directorate of Cultural Heritage to elaborate projects
  
• Provide expertise to the State to help it inventory its intangible cultural heritage
  
• Continue to support Chad in the promotion of intangible cultural heritage

This UNESCO Capacity-Building Workshop on Developing Safeguarding Plan for ICH took place from 24 to 28 October 2016 in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
It followed the three earlier workshops on capacity building under the 2003 ICH Convention which took place between 2012 and 2015 with the funding support of the Japanese Funds-in-Trust.
The progress of work on ICH in Sri Lanka after the country’s ratification of the 2003 Convention was noted as not being fully satisfactory, with a
recognition of the need to speak to policy makers and legislators to prepare a national policy – if not a national act – on ICH. The purpose of the
workshop was underlined: to understand the intricacy of coordinating with multiple stakeholders who are involved in an ICH element to develop a
mutually satisfactory safeguarding plan.

The Center of Cultural Heritage of Mongolia will hold a four-day workshop from 24 to 27 October 2016 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia to train cultural policy decision-makers on the digitization of inventory of intangible cultural heritage as part of the directive for the implementation of the UNESCO 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.
An expert in digitization from China will conduct the training of over 50 provincial officers from all 21 provinces in Mongolia on techniques and methods to transfer the present database of intangible heritage from the current analogue format into a digital one.
The workshop is being organized in partnership with the Mongolian National Commission for UNESCO and eight other national facilitators and is based on the current needs of the existing National Inventory and human capacity in Mongolia.
The aim is to offer effective safeguarding of the living heritage of Mongolia, through the digitization of the inventory which has been recommended to conform to the UNESCO framework for inventorying and furthermore to establish a facility of experts to be mobilized in the future for additional training needs and for providing guidance at the provincial and local level in conducting and digitizing inventories.
This activity follows capacity-building efforts carried out within the framework of the UNESCO/Japan Funds-in-Trust project ‘Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage through Strengthening National Capacities in Asia and the Pacific’ and its specific activities in Mongolia on implementation of the 2003 Convention (2012), community-based inventorying (2013), elaboration of nomination files (2015) and most recently on the preparation of safeguarding plans (2016).
In particular, lessons learned from UNESCO-accredited facilitators in the past trainings will be applied utilizing contextualized UNESCO materials and emphasizing the social function, cultural meaning and viability of intangible cultural heritage elements, as the existing registry focuses rather on individual practitioners. This approach is aimed at facilitating the consolidation of inventories, documentation at the provincial level and access for local communities and national authorities.

The needs assessment was implemented and funded by the Regional Bureau of UNESCO in Venice and was performed in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Moldova. The study aimed to assess the legal and institutional frameworks for the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage in the Republic of Moldova; to outline the needs in terms of professional and institutional capacities for the safeguarding of ICH; and to develop a multi-year action plan for implementation of recommendations, including proposals for capacity-building in the country.

This workshop is an activity of a two-year (2014-2016) project financed by UNESCO/Japan Fund-in-Trust, to support effective implementation of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in Nigeria. The objective of this workshop is to develop the capacities of the local community members through community-based inventorying training. A team comprising some UNESCO staff, representatives of the Federal Ministry of Tourism, Culture and National Orientation and its parastatals. The workshop was facilitated by UNESCO-trained facilitator Silverse Anami and national facilitator Professor G.G Darah.

The workshop was attended by 15 practitioners and 10 of which were selected to conduct a six-month inventorying exercise.

What is policy development for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage? What are the needs in this field in Latin America and the Caribbean? How does the topic fit in UNESCO’s global capacity-building programme for the implementation of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage? These questions will be addressed at a training workshop in Lima, Peru, from 3 to 7 October 2016 on supporting policy development in the field of intangible cultural heritage in Latin America and the Caribbean. More than 35 participants will participate, including 12 members of UNESCO’s facilitators’ network that has accumulated experience in providing training and advisory services under the global capacity-building programme as well as 12 UNESCO colleagues from field offices in charge of programme coordination in the region.

Organized by UNESCO and co-hosted by the Regional Centre for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Latin America (CRESPIAL), this is the third workshop in the region dedicated to strengthening the network of expert facilitators. Aiming to equip them with the knowledge and tools required to provide policy support and to take stock of the implementation of the capacity-building programme in the region since 2013.

Documents

• Agenda: English|Spanish
• List of participants: English
• Workshop note: English|Spanish

1. Dans le cadre du programme de l’UNESCO pour le renforcement des capacités pour la sauvegarde du patrimoine culturel immatériel (PCI) financé par le programme régulier du Secteur de la culture du Bureau Régional de l’UNESCO à Dakar (UNESCO-BREDA), une expertise a été fournie entre octobre et décembre 2016. Celle-ci a eu comme objectifs d’analyser les besoins du Sénégal en matière de renforcement des capacités pour la sauvegarde du PCI dans le but de proposer un projet futur. Dans ce contexte, une mission à Dakar a eu lieu entre le 13 et le 20 novembre 2016. En collaboration avec les institutions responsables pour la sauvegarde du PCI au Sénégal, cette mission a cherché à identifier sur le terrain les besoins et les objectifs clés pouvant être abordés dans le cadre de la stratégie de renforcement des capacités de l’UNESCO pour la sauvegarde du PCI.