Alliance for Cultural First Aid, Peace and Resilience is a groundbreaking project, which in partnership with the ALIPH Foundation, will strengthen capacities for risk reduction, preparedness, response and recovery among communities adversely affected by armed conflicts, extreme hazard events and epidemics. The project focuses on the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan region (MENAP) affected by intersecting conflicts, which have led to extreme vulnerabilities to hazard events and health crises.
The project is built on the principle that integrating cultural heritage protection with humanitarian relief makes a meaningful contribution to alleviating the trauma of affected communities, while promoting early recovery and transition to sustainable peace. Its goal is to form a proactive alliance of “cultural first aiders” from the region, who can work with security forces and humanitarians to provide conflict-sensitive protection and care to cultural heritage and contribute to peace and resilience.
Over 23 months, four mentors and 20 professionals will be trained to implement between 15 and 20 field projects. They will seek to protect endangered heritage – movable, immovable, and intangible – by involving local communities and stakeholders.
Through targeted training, awareness building and on-the-ground application, Alliance for Cultural First Aid, Peace and
Resilience will gather evidence to make the case for culture. This will include:
The preparation and translation of learning resources:
- Videos on how to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on tangible and intangible heritage and associated communities in conflict situations.
- The Arabic translation of ICCROM’s widely implemented Handbook and Toolkit on First Aid to Cultural Heritage in Times of Crisis.
- A learning package on community-based approaches for crisis response and risk management for cultural heritage in conflict areas.
Dissemination of ALIPH Foundation’s call for proposals mitigating impacts of COVID-19 on heritage amongst ICCROM network in conflict and post-conflict countries.
Online and in-person training:
- A course-design meeting with ICCROM’s professional networks will develop a context-specific curriculum based on multi-hazard and people-centred approaches.
- Four months of online learning and preparatory mentoring.
- Two weeks of in-person, hands-on training, which will take place in Cairo, Egypt.
Seven months of structured follow-up, which will include seed grants and online mentoring as training participants carry out projects that will see community members trained and greater coordination mechanisms between humanitarian agencies. A post-project publication that will feature stories of participant field projects and successes, as well as lessons learned.
Partners
ICCROM will collaborate with Egyptian Ministries of Antiquities and Defence; the Egyptian Heritage Rescue Foundation, a foundation created as a result of ICCROM’s training, which is dedicated to the protection of cultural heritage in crises; the Center for Security Studies, a Zurich-based organisation dedicated to promoting the understanding of security policy challenges as a contribution to a more peaceful world; as well as many of its long-standing partners and its alumni network of cultural first aiders.
Other partners important to the project will be identified from mainstream agencies working in the field of disaster risk reduction, humanitarian aid and conflict transformation. The expected input of these partners will be at a technical level, in order to help shape the training modules, as well as develop and promote interagency coordination.
This project is made possible thanks to the generous contribution of the ALIPH Foundation.
Learning resources
Since the project was launched in June 2020, ICCROM has been working closely with its partners from EHRF to prepare and translate the following learning resources:
- Three self-help videos on how to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on tangible and intangible heritage and associated communities in conflict situations.
- Video 1: Protecting Cultural Heritage during COVID-19 (Part 1 and Part 2)
- Video 2: Safeguarding Cultural Heritage and Supporting Livelihoods in Crises
- Video 3: Coming soon!
- An ongoing translation into Arabic of ICCROM’s widely implemented handbook and toolkit on First Aid to Cultural Heritage in Times of Crisis.
- A resource – started based on needs assessment in the region: ongoing work on an additional learning package focusing on community-based approaches for crisis response and risk management for cultural heritage in conflict areas with the aim to reduce tensions at the community level, including case examples and practical tools and tips. It will first be produced in English then translated to Arabic and will be available in both online and print form.
Course
Over 23 months, four mentors and 20 professionals from the MENAP region will be trained to implement between 15 and 20 field projects. They will seek to protect endangered heritage – movable, immovable, and intangible – by involving local communities and stakeholders through targeted training, awareness building and on-the-ground application.
This course, which is a second bilingual (Arabic and English) initiative of FAR, is composed of three different phases (the dates were subject to change in accordance with the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic):
- Phase 1: On-line Training from 15 March to 5 November 2021, followed by mentoring support to participants.
- Phase 2: In-person workshop training in Amman, Jordan from 28 November to 12 December 2021 (initially set to take place in Cairo, Egypt).
- Phase 3: Post-training project implementation phase from 1 March 2022 to 31 August 2022.
Modules addressed: Terms and Concepts, Situation Analysis, Stakeholder Consultations, Risk Assessment, Working with Communities, Introduction to Risk Mitigation.