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The online workshop aimed at capitalizing on a dynamic ecosystem of stakeholders from academia, practitioners, civil society organizations (CSOs), educators and artists. A joint initiative by UNESCO and and the Organization for Identity and Cultural Development (OICD), it provided a platform to synergize initiatives and good practices for managing diversity and addressing the root causes of conflicts and violence, which are much needed for fostering inclusion, social cohesion, reconciliation, and peacebuilding in Eastern Africa and beyond. 

More than 80 participants from the region and beyond joined the conversation to share best practices and discuss common challenges in the different contexts where they operate. The gathering created opportunities to establish a network for enhancing communication, collaboration and knowledge exchange on approaches and methods used by different actors to advance positive social change through culture and arts education. 

The agenda of the workshop featured prominent keynote speakers as Mr Pierre Sané, Founder and President of Imagine Africa, who emphasized the need to manage social transformations through evidence-based policies, and multi-stakeholder dialogue that he believes will boost positive trends and impact, including through creativity and the arts. He identified the youth and their demographics as a strategic group for achieving desired positive social transformations impact. He further considered artists and other social influencers as main targets to consider, in an effort to ensure they are exposed to relevant contents, inspiring narratives with Pan Africanist vision, that they could in turn use to nurture the minds and the spirit of the younger generation. Above all, he repositioned the UNESCO Management of Social Transformations (MOST) Programme at the heart of positive social change we want to see in our societies. 

The very concept and definition of arts education was explored from a variety of perspectives, including at the policy-level – through the ongoing efforts of the Working Group of the African Union Commission on a draft continental policy on arts education, chaired by Dr. Christiana Deliewen Afrikaner, who also attended the workshop and shared artistic, theoretical, and practical approaches and perspectives.

In his intervention, Dr John Johnston, Director of Master’s Artist Educator and Social Practice at ArtEZ Institute of the Arts (The Netherlands), reaffirmed the potential of the arts to challenge the concept of single identity and its contribution to the development of empathy and cultural sensitivity. He called for more investment in the soft power of the arts that he believes speaks directly to the mind and to the soul, for positive social transformations.

Strategies and approaches using arts education to foster the development of intercultural skills were presented. Dr Darla Deardorff, UNESCO Chair of Intercultural Competences at Stellenbosch University (South Africa), and Executive Director for the Association of International Education Administrators outlined in this regard the story circles, a methodology she developed for UNESCO, which she believed has proven to be effective in both formal and non-formal contexts. 

Besides, different NGOs – AfriNov and the Centre for People’s Development from Kenya, Culturans (Mexico), and Sunrays (South Sudan) – also had an opportunity to share about methodologies, tools, and strategies they use for integrating identity in their art-based practices for community engagement. 

Two film screening sessions were held featuring “Meat" - an award-winning short film depicting the struggles of the Ugandan Batwa indigenous group – and a short documentary of the UNESCO project in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, which aims to build resilience among refugee and host communities through trainings for preservation of intangible cultural heritage, using traditional music and the restauration of related instruments. 

Overall, while the role of arts education is not fully valued nor evenly integrated in formal and non-formal educational systems across African countries. The conversations, reflections, and good practices shared showed a wide range of actors committed to advancing the culture and arts education agenda, particularly in informal and non-formal settings, building on the emerging conviction that identity can be creatively utilized as a powerful tool to managing diversity and redressing the root causes of conflicts and violence, by fostering inclusion, social cohesion, reconciliation, and peacebuilding in our societies. 

This aligns with UNESCO’s efforts to strengthen the nexus between culture and education and its contribution to promoting cultural diversity, intercultural dialogue and sustainable development, in line with UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2001),  the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005), the Framework for Enabling Intercultural Dialogue and the UNESCO Framework for Culture and Arts Education, under development, among other instruments. This also underpins the African Union Agenda 2023, the “Africa We Want”, and its Aspiration 2 which calls for “an integrated continent, politically united and based on the ideals of Pan-Africanism and the vision of Africa’s Renaissance”, and its Aspiration 5, reaffirming the need for “an Africa with a strong cultural identity, common heritage, shared values and ethics”.

The development of a Practitioner's Toolkit compiling good practices collected throughout the exchanges into an actionable set of tools and perspectives was agreed as a way forward that OICD and participating organizations could engage on, building also on the results of a survey launched ahead of the workshop and that benefited from responses of 130 organizations.