Call for expressions of interest - Policy-paper on community-based approaches to safeguarding living heritage and sustainable development frameworks

The project ‘Building capacities for safeguarding living heritage and preparing nominations to the Lists of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in Africa’ is dedicated to safeguarding and promoting the rich diversity of intangible cultural heritage across Africa, with a focus on nine countries that had no elements inscribed on the Lists of the 2003 Convention in December 2023. The project countries are Comoros, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Eswatini, Gabon, Guinea Bissau, Lesotho, Sao Tome and Principe and South Sudan.

The project aims to strengthen the skills and knowledge of States Parties to prepare nomination files to the Lists and the Register of the 2003 Convention. Through a combination of capacity-building initiatives, peer learning and experience-sharing opportunities among stakeholders, the project encourages South-South cooperation for intangible cultural heritage safeguarding. By facilitating dialogue between States Parties in Africa, it aims to create a supportive environment where expertise and good practices can be shared to strengthen nomination processes.

Furthermore, by encouraging the integration of living heritage into broader culture sector policies, notably through strengthened community-based approaches in policy design, the project seeks to embed intangible cultural heritage into national and regional sustainable development frameworks. In particular, it aims to strengthen States capacities to identify the opportunities and challenges of creating synergies between the policy frameworks for safeguarding living heritage and those of other UNESCO culture conventions with a view to articulate them better in cultural policy design for safeguarding living heritage and sustainable development.

To that end, a policy paper will be developed on integrating intangible cultural heritage into sustainable development frameworks in Africa through bottom-up approaches. It will aim to demonstrate how community-based approaches to safeguarding intangible cultural heritage can contribute to the objectives set by sustainable development frameworks in Africa, identify and analyse good experiences that showcase this dynamic, and provide recommendations to States Parties and relevant stakeholders on how to strengthen this contribution in policy design and implementation.

The good experiences identified will also be considered for inclusion in an [online platform](https://ich.unesco.org/en/sharing-good-safeguarding-experiences) for sharing good safeguarding experiences. The platform, developed by the Living Heritage Entity, intends to highlight safeguarding approaches across the various domains of intangible cultural heritage, ensure representation of the thematic initiatives of the 2003 and other initiatives related to UNESCO priority groups, while providing a space for communities and other stakeholders to share, exchange, and find inspiration regarding safeguarding approaches.

To that end, the contractor shall undertake the following tasks:

3.1 The contractor shall submit for approval by UNESCO the deliverables listed below as per the following schedule, along with a signed and dated payment claim for each instalment foreseen in article 1.4 of the present contract: