A national capacity building workshop on community-based inventorying of intangible cultural heritage will be organized by UNESCO (Venice Office/Sarajevo Antenna Office), in close cooperation with the Ministry of Civil Affairs and the National Commission for UNESCO of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo from 21 to 27 Mai 2012.

The event will bring together experts, NGOs, community members, local authorities, government officials, and actors at the heart of the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. The objective is to build capacity of all relevant stakeholders to inventory intangible cultural heritage following a community-based approach.

The workshop will provide participants with the necessary knowledge, skills and tools for effective documentation and inventorying of intangible cultural heritage under the 2003 Convention and will also include a fieldwork practicum at the end of the workshop. The event will be facilitated by Rieks Smeets, linguist and former chief of UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage section, and Sasha Sreckovic, Ethnographer from the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade (Serbia).

This workshop is a direct follow-up to the regional training on “Strengthening national capacities for the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage in Europe”, organized by UNESCO in Sofia, Bulgaria (14-18 March 2011). The 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage was ratified by Bosnia and Herzegovina in February 2009.