The Ministry of Education, Arts, and Culture, in collaboration with the Namibia National Commission for UNESCO, is hosting an eight-day community-based heritage workshop at Opuwo in the Kunene Region.
The workshop brought together 34 key community representatives from Omaheke, Otjozondjupa, Kunene, and Erongo regions.
The workshop aims to safeguard the Okuruuo project, loosely translated as "the holy fire," through community-based capacity building, inventorying, and documentation intervention in Namibia.
Participants will be introduced to the 2003 UNESCO Convention and some of its key concepts to enable communities to identify and define their intangible cultural heritage, as well as to the community-based inventory and documentation process.
"As a ministry, you will understand that we have a mandate of identifying, protecting, preserving, and protecting heritage, and within the scope of our international cooperation, we have multilateral agreements within the scope, and one of the agreements is the 2003 convention that deals with intangible cultural heritage," said Boyson Ngondo, Deputy Director in the Ministry of Education, Arts, and Culture.
Community-based inventory is one of the five thematic areas of the capacity-building program on safeguarding intangible cultural heritage implemented through the 2003 UNESCO Convention.
"For UNESCO at the global level, it is our responsibility to support member states; Namibia is a member state, and we support them with regard to the protection of the cultural heritage within the country, and for this workshop, UNESCO is here to make sure that the country is implementing the convention," explained Helvi Moshell, UNESCO National Program Officer for Culture.
Participants will learn how to identify, generate, and analyze their intangible cultural heritage knowledge through techniques such as interviews and participatory videos.
At the end of the workshop, they should be able to design and conduct community-based inventory activities.
Dr Theophilus Kamupingene is one of the participants at the workshop.
"The training comes about as an eye opener with regard to UNESCO's role, the assistance it gives in assisting communities so that at the end of the day to collect information from the community, especially with regard to Okuruuo, for people to know what is Okuruuo."