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.