More than VND1.5 trillion ($74 million) was approved to run a preservation project and advance the cultural identities of ethnic minorities in Vietnam by 2020, Deputy Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism Ho Anh Tuan announced yesterday.
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| Kho Mu people of nothern mountainous Yen Bai Province dance at a festival for good weather and bumper crops in Van Chan District. |
The project is to assist ethnic groups with special attention on those on the verge of becoming extinct or not financially and technically competent enough to protect their own cultural heritage.
Activities will be implemented in the mountainous and remote areas, home to the majority of ethnic groups, said the ministry\'s Traditional Culture Department Hoang Duc Hau.
The six components of the project include compiling a general inventory of natural heritage, providing emergency operations and capacity building on cultural preservation, abolishing unsound customs, integrating economic development with culture preservation and development, introducing and promoting ethnic literature and arts, incorporating lessons on the traditional cultures of ethnic groups into academic curriculum and developing mechanisms to encourage craftsmen to pass down their erudition to younger generations.
One of the key outputs of the project will be to export a set of indicators on cultural development of ethnic minorities groups in Vietnam.
By 2020, it was expected that 70 to 85 percent of mountain and highland villages will have a communal cultural house with an agenda run by cultural identities. Sixty to 80 percent of officials working on culture-related tasks are to be recruited from ethnic minorities communities.
The project would adopt a bottom-up approach where the cultural identities would be put in the centre.
