Between October 1st and 9th, the city of Kairouan roared to life to celebrate the Mouled Festival, an annual event celebrating the birth of the Prophet Muhammad. For this 8-day celebration, domestic and international visitors participated in religious ceremonies, including Quran memorization and reading competitions in various mosques, cultural and artistic events, and exhibitions dedicated to Tunisian handicrafts. The festival included more than 75 events over nine days against a beautiful backdrop: Kairouan’s streets were lit throughout the night, with the sweet smell of incense, freshly baked makroudh, and rose water wafting in the air.
The date of the celebration changes each year in accordance with the lunar calendar. The Kairouanaise are faithful to their ancestral customs and continue celebrating "the Mouled" with the same fervor of the past. This was the first gathering of Mouled since 2019, and attendance continues to grow year over year, with an increasing number of international visitors.
USAID Visit Tunisia Smithsonian Folklife Incubator supports Mouled Festival, welcoming 1.2 million visitors to Kairouan
Articles / 28-10-2022
In April, the Mouled Festival was selected as one of six festivals to join the USAID Visit Tunisia’s Smithsonian Folklife Incubator program, an intensive program to build capacity in programming, design, operations, community engagement, and marketing for heritage events in Tunisia. The Mouled Festival was chosen based on its demonstrated commitment to community engagement and cultural heritage representation, economic impact, and geographic representation.
For the last several months, organizers of the Mouled Festival have participated in one-on-one exchange sessions through the incubator program, determined to ensure this year’s edition was a success. They discussed issues of custom technical assistance and one-on-one mentoring with industry experts to improve programming, community engagement, design, and marketing.
The week before the festival, the USAID Visit Tunisia and Smithsonian team arrived in Kairouan. Areas of support included security and safety, site management, programming coordination, and volunteer management. The team worked in collaboration with the festival organizers to make on site adjustments and evaluate festival activities.
In a commitment to strengthen the festival offerings and visitor experience, USAID Visit Tunisia and the Smithsonian team are reviewing the festival operations, events, and turnout to ensure next year’s iteration is even better. For example, the team identified crowd control and management as an area of improvement for future events, as well as the need for new ways to communicate with guests when they are in Kairouan for the festival.
Continuing the work with the domestic marketing campaign, USAID Visit Tunisia enlisted influencer Fatma Bouon to travel to Kairouan with her family to create content around the Mouled Festival. Fatma has 900,000 followers on Instagram, and her posts about the Mouled Festival received over 70,000 likes.
A screenshot of the Kairouan spotlight by Fatma Bououn
The Festival of Mouled shone a positive light on Kairouan as a culturally-rich destination, and received attention from both domestic and regional media outlets. USAID Visit Tunisia Project Engagement Specialist Ahmed Charfi noted, “In my eyes, one of the best successes the festival had this year was to show the world a positive image of this beautiful, historic city.”
USAID Visit Tunisia’s partnership with the Smithsonian Folklife Incubator provides an opportunity to ensure many more successful events in the future, attracting tourists from around the globe to Tunisia to participate in these unique cultural experiences. Stay tuned to hear about the other festivals being supported through the incubator happening in the upcoming months.
