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UNESCO moves to strengthen resilience of African Memory Institutions in the face of COVID-19 and beyond
The UNESCO Memory of the World (MoW) Programme is organizing an international symposium on 鈥淪trengthening the resilience of African memory institutions in the face of COVID-19 and beyond鈥. The two-day event, which includes a capacity-building workshop on crafting emergency preparedness plans, will take place online on 7-8 September 2021.
The COVID-19 pandemic has not only rendered the tasks of preservation and physical access impossible, but has also exposed policy and capacity weaknesses 鈥 both at the national and institutional levels 鈥 of memory institutions in terms of emergency preparedness plans.
The MoW Programme is partnering with the National Archives Administration of China (NAAC) to advocate for increased investment in documentary heritage and the formulation, implementation and evaluation of enabling national policies as part of disaster risk reduction.
The NAAC will bring a unique comparative advantage to the project, building on its track record in response to COVID-19, which included the issuance of a notification requiring archival departments to provide the government and health departments with historical pandemic documents and document the pandemic crisis.
The objectives of the symposium are to:
- Analyse how memory institutions in African countries have responded to COVID-19 and share lessons learned for moving forward.
- Promote South-to-South cooperation by providing a platform for exchange between memory institutions in African countries and Asia and the Pacific. A special focus will be placed on the responses to COVID-19 by the National Archives Administration of China (NAAC), a key partner for this symposium.
- Identify the challenges and opportunities for implementing effective national documentary heritage preservation and accessibility policies, in line with the UNESCO 2015 Recommendation Concerning the Preservation of, and Access to, Documentary Heritage Including in Digital Form.
- Propose ways of incorporating documentary heritage within the framework of disaster risk reduction strategy.
- Develop a pan-African emergency preparedness initiative for memory institutions.
