An Emarati woman wearing the traditional burqa (face mask) roasting Arabic
coffee beans using Al-Mehmas and Al-Migla (a copper stir and a pan, tools for roasting Arabic coffee)
while participating in an Arabic coffee making competition.
© Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority (TCA), 2006

The second of three capacity-building workshops for the Hamdan Bin Mohammed Heritage Center is taking place this week in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, from 24-30 January, 2016.

The community-based inventorying workshop, in the context of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, will focus on issues of ethics and responsibilities, techniques for information generation, as well as how to organize data from inventories in order to elaborate safeguarding plans. It will also demonstrate how to put community-based inventorying into practice through field work to be conducted in various locations and engaging with the communities in Jumeirah, Heta and Al Zeed. Comprising of 24 participants from the Center’s staff and various stakeholders working in the field of cultural heritage, as well as community associations, this workshop will provide them with the practical know-how of identifying the appropriate and contextually relevant methods required for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage in Dubai.

Moreover, a special focus will be given to the establishment of the inventorying framework with the communities concerned, the ethics of editing audio-visual materials, techniques of storing the collected material and related ethics concerned with the right to access the materials.

The workshop is an integral part of strengthening capacity building in Dubai, while also raising awareness and strengthening safeguarding capacities within the communities concerned, as well as developing an inventorying process in cooperation with them.

Conducted by UNESCO expert facilitators, and supported by the Hamdan Bin Mohammed Heritage Center, this tailored workshop is an example of capacity-building at an institutional level to better integrate the provisions of the Convention in its activities at the local level.