Benefitting country(ies): Mauritania

Overview:

The proposed six-month project is an additional component of the National Oral
Traditions (NOT) project, to be 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 is 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 proposes 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.

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