Training of trainers on inventorying living heritage with the School of African Heritage (EPA)

12 September 2013

The elaboration of community-based inventories is at the heart of the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage and requires specific skills, which are, however, not always sufficiently mastered in countries that have ratified, including in Africa, a priority region for UNESCO. It is therefore urgent that the members of UNESCO’s network of trainers in Africa, which was set up to support the implementation of the Convention, have the pedagogical and methodological tools necessary to facilitate training in this area. UNESCO and the School of African Heritage (EPA) are inviting them to update their competencies on community-based inventorying and acquaint themselves with the training modules developed by the UNESCO for this purpose.

Thanks to the financial support of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Fund EPA will host a training-of-trainers workshop on inventory-making from 16 to 23 September 2013 in its premises in Porto-Novo, Benin. The twenty-five participants are the EPA technical staff, French-speaking members of UNESCO’s network of facilitators from Africa as well as some professionals from the International Centre for Research and Documentation on African Traditions and Languages (CERDOTOLA). The workshop will be co-facilitated by two experts, Claudine Augée Angoué (Gabon) and Sidi Traore (Burkina Faso) in collaboration with the Director of the EPA, Baba Keita (Mali). It is expected that at the end of the workshop each participant is able to facilitate a training on community-based inventorying of intangible cultural heritage in the spirit of the Convention.

• Benin