By Khalifa Hemed
Published February 24, 2023
Organisations, groups and individuals working with the heritage sector in Africa are invited to apply for small grants between US$5000 and US$50000 to support projects that focus on the protection of and/or promotion of local heritage for socio-economic development.
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“We are looking to unleash the potential of heritage in Africa, in order to make a difference for the development of local communities,” says Evangelos Kyriakidis, Director of Heritage Management Organization, the organisation behind the initiative. “Heritage has the ability to empower and we are ready to partner with local organizations around the continent to this end.”
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Applicants are expected to demonstrate that their project addresses one or more of three criteria:
1) Sustainability – Our focus is on projects that will have a lasting impact, much beyond the duration of the project, for example protecting heritage sites from desertification by creating green belts, preserving/stabilizing/restoring and adaptively reusing a historic building for community needs, researching the public heritage landscape, installing solar panels at heritage sites to generate income or decrease expenditure in the long term, building eco-friendly tourism infrastructure, direct interventions that strengthen social institutions, like traditional methods of mediation, etc.
2) Capacity development and network building – We encourage projects that strengthen local skills and build closer links with peer organizations in the HERITΛGE network. Examples include on-the-job training in preventive conservation (e.g clearing or fencing sites), experience and expertise exchanges with other local NGOs on shared issues such as desertification or erosion of sites, co-operative training on museum exhibition design, etc.
3) Concrete and community impact – We encourage projects with strong, measurable incomes in terms of heritage protection and benefits to local people. Each project should provide clear indicators of the planned impact. These indicators will depend on the type of work carried out but some examples include increased visitation to a heritage site or program, financial benefits to the local community in terms of increased employment opportunities or local businesses created; tourism earnings; money savings by solar panel installation; the size of area protected from desertification, etc.
Detailed information and application forms are on the organisation’s website.
