Who Saved Al Sadu: The People Behind the UAE’s Revival

In 2011, on the UAE’s own nomination, UNESCO placed “Al Sadu, traditional weaving skills in the United Arab Emirates” on its List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. Oil wealth, settlement and cheap industrial cloth had left the knowledge with a dwindling number of older women. Fourteen years later, in December 2025, UNESCO moved Al Sadu to its Representative List — and named the Emirati programme behind the turnaround one of the world’s good safeguarding practices.

That did not happen by decree. It took institutions, funds, charities and, above all, weavers. These are some of the people and programmes who made it happen.

The national programme, 2011–2023

UNESCO’s record describes twelve years of research, documentation, knowledge transfer, dissemination, marketing support and awareness-raising, carried out in a concerted and participatory way with the weavers and their communities. Abu Dhabi’s cultural authority — today the Department of Culture and Tourism — played a central part in the nomination. The result, in UNESCO’s words, was continuity: weavers meeting again in small groups to spin and weave, girls learning by watching, and work and income for a large number of people.

Sougha: making the craft pay

Launched in 2009 by the Khalifa Fund for Enterprise Development, Sougha set out to preserve Emirati heritage by turning traditional crafts into a livelihood. It began in Ghayathi, in Abu Dhabi’s western region, and supports Sadu weavers alongside makers of khoos, talli and other crafts — training them, improving their materials and finding them buyers. It has grown to include hundreds of artisans across Abu Dhabi emirate.

Al Ghadeer UAE Crafts: women, wool and work

Founded in 2006 by Her Highness Sheikha Shamsa bint Hamdan Al Nahyan under the Emirates Red Crescent, Al Ghadeer UAE Crafts trains women in Emirati crafts and gives them designs, raw materials and marketing so that their work sells. More than two hundred craftswomen of different ages and nationalities have worked with it. Its weavers teach Sadu in public — at Dubai Design Week, among other places — passing on named patterns such as Al Shajarah, Al Ain, Al Dal’a and Al Uwairjan, as they were taught by the generations before them.

The House of Artisans

In April 2021, Abu Dhabi opened the House of Artisans inside the Qasr Al Hosn complex, around the city’s oldest stone building. Al Sadu is one of its three featured crafts, with khoos and talli. Visitors meet the artisans, watch them at work and can join workshops — and the House took Al Sadu to a world audience at Expo 2020 Dubai.

The Abu Dhabi Register of Artisans

Run by the Department of Culture and Tourism, the Register records the people who still hold traditional skills. Al Sadu — spinning, weaving and dyeing — is one of its seventeen registered crafts. Artisans are assessed as trainee, practising or master, and gain training, access to fairs and festivals, support with materials and funding, and eligibility for nomination as a National Living Treasure.

A craft that pays is a craft that survives.

December 2025

At its twentieth session, in New Delhi, UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Committee moved Al Sadu off the urgent list and onto the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. In the same decision, it selected the UAE’s safeguarding programme for the Register of Good Safeguarding Practices — one of only three programmes added worldwide that year, alongside entries from Croatia and China, and one of 43 on the Register in total.

The recognition belongs to the weavers first. But it also belongs to a country that decided a craft held by a handful of grandmothers was worth twelve years of national effort.