As young people are a key target group for UNESCO, raising the younger generation’s awareness of ICH and strengthening their ICH safeguarding and transmitting capacities are crucial for the realization of a sustainable development for mankind.

For example, the “Follow Me for ICH” training was the first workshop of CRIHAP’s three-year ICH safeguarding capacity-building plan for Chinese youths. Faced with various uncertainties amid the pandemic, the first training workshop adopted a new mode that combined online lectures with offline video-shooting exercises to cater to the needs of young Chinese trainees. The event eventually attracted more than 130 students from 50 Chinese colleges and universities. After attending a five-day online course, the trainees spent five weeks making ICH-themed field trips for their local communities and produced 73 short videos on topics including traditional skills, arts and crafts, and performances. By capturing ICH items around them with video cameras, these young people have come to see the beauty of ICH in their daily lives. And training experience meant a step toward becoming guardians of ICH items.

Building a network of ICH facilitators has always been an important way for UNESCO to implement its global capacity-building strategy. In 2021, the CRIHAP organized training of trainers workshops for ICH facilitators for the Philippines and the Pacific.

The training for the Philippines showed CRIHAP’s further exploration into the online-plus-offline training mode. The workshop kicked off at the end of 2021. From February to March, trainees mainly learned by themselves while attending an online lecture every two weeks and sharing their own findings, exchanging ideas and discussing questions. At the end of April, they participated in a three-day online training session. CRIHAP considered the new training mode to be a countermeasure to normalized epidemic control and an experiment to find better ways to carry out international training workshops. CRIHAP has also held a “training of trainers” workshop for ICH safeguarding, the first of its kind for countries in the Pacific region.

In response to the growing trend of multinational nomination of ICH items, CRIHAP has organized workshops for representatives from all 11 Southeast Asian countries on sub-regional multinational nomination to strengthen the construction of a network for multinational nomination, consolidate international cooperation in ICH safeguarding and improve Southeast Asian countries’ ability to share ICH resources with each other and their ability to coordinate the developments of widely diverse cultures in the region.

In 2021, CRIHAP continued to push forward the organization of separate training workshops for UNESCO state parties. Of these events, the Laos workshop will be the first separate training event and the first of a three-year training workshop series devised specifically for the country. CRIHAP will work to lay a solid foundation for ICH safeguarding in Laos by carrying out the three-year training workshops.

CRIHAP has already organized four training workshops for Bangladesh. In the four years since 2018, CRIHAP held a series of training workshops for Bangladesh with such themes as implementation of the convention ICH inventorying and nomination and sustainable development, playing a positive role in uplifting the country’s overall ICH safeguarding capabilities.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected the organization of international training workshops, CRIHAP has overcome difficulties, found alternative solutions and accomplished all training tasks as planned.

Over the past two years, CRIHAP has adopted online training as a major teaching mode. It has tried to bypass the teaching mode’s disadvantages and make the best use of its advantages, operating under the principles of “learning by doing” and “solving problems through development”. For example, the training workshop for Vietnam was greatly affected by the country’s epidemic control measures. Postponed four times due to new outbreaks, the training workshop was eventually conducted as planned.