Africa Regional Committee of the Memory of the World Programme (ARCMoW)

You are most welcome to the official website of the Africa Regional Committee of the Memory of the World Programme (ARCMoW), set up in 1998 and is the regional forum for UNESCO’s global Memory of the World (MOW) Programme.

Now, and even more, than ever before, institutions of memory in Africa, namely Libraries Archives, and Museums, are encountering several challenges that threaten the preservation and overall availability of and access to documentary heritage. Such challenges present as improper storage, weather conditions that affect the materials, poor handling of the materials, and lack of funds to make available proper storage facilities all making adequate preservation near impossible. It is the desire of ARCMoW to work with these institutions to bring the materials up to scratch, create awareness about the usefulness of documentary heritage and the need to preserve them, and also in conjunction with these institutions build the capacity of Africans to maintain these documentary heritage for posterity.