Expanded interest in safeguarding the intangible cultural heritage is strongly demonstrated by the new files received from forty four States Parties for the cycle that began on 31 March 2012 and will end in November 2013.
Among the submitting States, eleven have never before had elements inscribed. For the first time, Africa is the region with the largest number of submitting States (twelve).These are the first tangible fruits of the capacity-building strategy conducted by UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage Section. With eight workshops held in 2011 and a dozen planned for 2012, Africa is the principal beneficiary of this global strategy funded by contributions from various donors.
The fifty five new files include thirteen nominations for the Urgent Safeguarding List and thirty three for the Representative List, four proposals for the Register of Best Safeguarding Practices and five requests for financial assistance greater than US$ 25,000.
These fifty five nominations join the 138 nominations submitted in previous cycles that have not been treated to date, due to the limited capacity of the Intergovernmental Committee and Secretariat. At its last session (Indonesia, November 2011), the Committee recommended that the General Assembly of the States Parties in June 2012 study the feasibility of establishing a ceiling for the number of files to be treated (item 5 of the draft agenda) so as to avoid the overload of recent years.