Importance of Culture

I am privileged to be a member of the Board of Industree Foundation , an NGO focusing on creative manufacturing by empowering women in rural areas, and Chittam , a startup focusing on educating children through innovative games, based on our rich Indic heritage and culture, and making them rooted in their culture and communities.

I was delighted to see a special focus on #Culture as a separate workstream in the current #g20 meetings happening in India.??At the?#unesco World Conference on Cultural Policies and Sustainable Development – #MONDIACULT2022, held in Mexico City from 28 to 30 September 2022, the Ministers of Culture of the Member States of #unesco adopted a?Final Declaration.

The Declaration recognizes

·???????The transformative impact of culture on sustainable development.

·???????Culture as a global public good with an intrinsic value

·???????Need to include Culture objectives as part of the post-2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

·???????World forum every 4 years on Culture

Reference: https://www.interarts.net/news/mondiacult-2022-final-declaration/

#g20 is another important forum where culture is becoming a focus area. The G20 Culture Ministers met for the first time in 2020 and highlighted culture’s cross-cutting contribution to advancing the G20 agenda. ?G20 acknowledged the synergies between culture and various other policy areas.??Considering the high impact of culture, cultural heritage, and the creative economy on the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of development, culture was integrated into the G20 agenda as a Culture Working Group in 2021. The group aims to strengthen international cooperation and collaboration to support cultural and creative industries.

Reference https://www.g20.org/en/workstreams/sherpa-track/

Under the Indian Presidency, the G20 Culture Working Group is conducting a series of four thematic Webinars between March and April 2023.

The four topics are:

·???????Protection and Restitution of Cultural Property

·???????Harnessing Living Heritage for a Sustainable Future

·???????Promotion of Cultural and Creative Industries and the Creative Economy

·???????Leveraging Digital Technologies for the Protection and the Promotion of Culture

The objective of these webinars is to harness the four priorities set forth by India through shared expertise and best practices to firmly position culture as an engine for propelling inclusive sustainable socio-economic recovery and development.

Reference : ?https://www.unesco.org/sites/default/files/medias/fichiers/2023/03/20230320_G20_Thematic%20Webinars_Guidance%20Note.pdf

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The Culture topic has moved from “nice to have” to “must have” to create sustainable development and also the inclusion of a larger number of people from the poor segment.?

During the launch of the @Chittam brand a few months ago in Chennai, Tamil Nadu one of the speakers Mr.D.K Hari @bharathgyan, jokingly talked about a serious theme.?He said that prior to mid-1800’s when the British Government in colonial India created CPWD Departments to manage all the ponds, lakes, and rivers, women folk in villages were managing the water sources.?During the women’s raj (rule), water was preserved, conserved, utilized for all the necessities, and allowed to flourish and sustain more water.?Then came the “men” of the British Government and overuse, clogging with garbage, sand erosion and depletion of water sources started.??Mr.D.K.Hari was actually conveying a serious message.?He was actually connecting gender equality with better sustainability.

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What have G20 and UNESCO got to do with Industree Foundation and Chittam ? I am coming to that.

What does Industree Foundation do???Just a few glimpses of their slogans.

·???????Lifting people out of poverty while celebrating their arts, skills, and cultural heritage

·???????Help women to become leaders and owners of their own destiny

·???????Building sustainable value chains using locally available natural materials

Preserving arts, and skills passed on through generations and scaling the creative manufacturing process by best green business practices are the central themes of @industree. Bamboo, Banana, and jute-based items being done on a small scale at rural homes have now become @indsutree Cooperatives with women members as owners and produced at large scale locally with high quality and sold globally. ?It almost looks similar to the four topics of G20 Workgroups.

While @Industree is focusing on the issue of scale, and access to markets as a means of lifting poverty and encouraging rural women to continue to work on their traditional arts and craft, there is a huge gap concerning the next generation.?Will next generation of these artisans whose parents have learned their arts, and crafts by word of mouth from generations, be interested in preserving the culture??There is another set of urban and semi-urban children who do not have even this exposure to their roots and culture and grew up on digital tools.?How to make these children and also their parents be interested in the culture and provide them with innovative tools to appreciate and learn???This is a million-dollar question and happy to see Chittam trying to attack this problem head-on.

Let us look at Chittam slogans:

·???????Your new Cultural Best Friend

·???????A new way to rediscover Indic wisdom, cultural values, and bonds across generations.

·???????Impart heritage values and Indic wisdom to children with games modeled around cultural stories of heroism, bravery, sacrifice, and virtues.?

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@Chittam games are designed in innovative ways to make it exciting for children to play and even encourage parents and grandparents to jointly play the games and go through the cultural learning process.

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I wish both organizations, Neelam Chhiber , and Charanya V Kumar great success and encourage all of you to look it up and help these organizations in any way possible. [www.chittam.in/shop & https://www.industree.org.in/about-us/]

#culture #indicvalues #traditions #roots #communities #genderequality #creative #maufacturing #sustainability #g20 #unesco #indianculture