This training course has been available since 15 December at the Institut spécialisé des arts traditionnels in Marrakech. The nine-month course is supervised by Mustapha Zouateni, a craftsman specialising in the manufacture of musical instruments. It has been created in partnership with UNESCO, and follows the announcement made by the King at the 17th session of the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, organised in Morocco in 2022, in which the Sovereign emphasised the importance of preserving this intangible cultural heritage as "a powerful marker of our identity, an essential component of our collective memory, a vehicle for the ideals and values that unite us, and a potential legacy for future generations".
The launch of this new training course is also part of the implementation of a partnership agreement signed on the fringes of the event between the Ministry of Tourism, Handicrafts, Social Economy and Solidarity and UNESCO, relating to the establishment of a sustainable system for the transfer of skills and the transmission of know-how linked to handicrafts, in particular those classified by the national inventory carried out by the Ministry with the support of this UN organisation as being threatened with extinction.
Photo : copyrights AFP.