Benefitting country(ies): Mauritania

Overview:

The project is an additional component of the National Oral
Traditions (NOT) project, implemented by the Mauritanian Institute for Research
and Training in Heritage and Culture (IMRFPC). The project was set up in 2015 to
safeguard and enhance the sound corpus of the IMRFPC. Despite the high value of the
corpus of oral traditions housed at the IMRFPC, it is not very representative of the
country’s regions. This project was thus aimed at conducting an additional campaign to
collect oral traditions from communities not originally targeted, giving priority to groups whose heritage is absent from written tradition, with the overall objective of supporting the safeguarding of local oral traditions through documentation, data collection and capacity building. Specifically, the project proposed to train resource persons from within the communities, prioritize the safeguarding of oral traditions at risk, correct a geographical and linguistic imbalance in previous collections, update the NOT project database and website, improve the technical and scientific skills of selected individuals and involve local associations and community representatives in safeguarding living heritage. At the end of this additional component, the project would thus make a more comprehensive, representative corpus of oral traditions from different regions and communities of Mauritania available to the public.

12/07/2025 - 12/07/2025 – Safeguarding and promoting intangible cultural heritage and supporting creativity of young people in the field of the music industry in the eastern region22/03/2019 - 09/11/2022 – Community-based inventorying and transmission of intangible cultural heritage in the island of Tongatapu in Tonga