When I began researching for my talk, I started by consulting the published volume celebrating SCOLMA's 50th anniversary that came out of the 2012 conference on African studies in the digital age: disconnect? I turned to the index at the back of the book to see how many times the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) was mentioned. There were three entries. The first included the programme amongst a list of projects that have supported or funded both large-scale and smaller digitisation initiatives in the region. The second mention was slightly more critical in tone, saying that the programme should provide more technical and logistical assistance, and the last reference was a brief sentence about a Gambian historian who had consulted the digitised Muslim court rolls from one of our projects when writing his doctoral thesis.

Digital archives in Rwanda are at the heart of national and international projects. This article traces two areas - education and research - in which the Genocide Archive of Rwanda is being used for awareness-raising, skills development, and interdisciplinary research. We discuss ‘Education for Sustainable Peace in Rwanda’, a three year programme initiated by the Aegis Trust, and ‘Rwandan Stories of Change’, a collaborative research project based at the University of St Andrews. These illustrate the value and potential of using an archive, and demonstrate how that archive is being developed as Rwanda as a nation continues to shift and change. We highlight the scope for impactful collaboration and the central importance of storytelling and testimony.

Between January and April 2016,1 was part of a British Library-funded project to restore, preserve, and digitise the archive of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA). The archive is held in a small room in the bell tower of St. Andrews church, Nairobi. The collection consists of the records of the colonialera Church of Scotland Mission (CSM) and its successor institution, the PCEA, which was formed in 1956 when the African church became independent from the Scottish mission. When I first accessed it, it was being used by the church as a place to store and dump all sorts of miscellaneous and unneeded objects. As well as the heaps of papers, it contained an old lectern, posters, brochures, parish leaflets, and general rubbish. Depending on one's perspective it could have been seen as not much of an “archive”, or much more than one.

Environmental history projects using repeat photography often involve the acquisition of large collections of historical and current images, matching those images for comparative analysis, and then cataloguing and archiving the imagery for long-term storage and later use (Webb et ah, 2010). When used in combination with other techniques, repeat photography is an excellent tool for documenting change (Gruell, 2010) and has been used in a variety of disciplines, including historical ecology, to determine changes in plant populations, soil erosion, climate trends and ecological processes to name a few. Historical photographs often provide greater temporal range to an analysis compared to, for example, satellite imagery and in many cases even aerial photography (Gruell, 2010).

The IRD (French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development) is a French research institute serving the Mediterranean and intertropical countries that make science and innovation one of the first levers of their development. It is a French public science and technology establishment (EPST) which is under the dual supervision of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research and the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs.

The Decree of 1 December 1955 (ORSTOM 1955) organising the services of the Office for Scientific and Technical Research Overseas, published in the Official Journal of the French Republic of 21 December 1955, defines the existence of a documentation centre under the direction of the Institute. Article 6 of the decree states that “le Centre de documentation est charge1 d'assurer le depouillement, la conservation et la diffusion de la documentation scientifique et technique se rapportant aux activitfe de 1'O.R.S.T.O.M.”.

Critics contend that Zimbabwe plunged into a political and economic crisis between 1999 and 2009. This decade in crisis witnessed a boom in a form of theatre that questions the authority and legitimacy of the state (Zenenga 2010). This theatre is highly adversarial and oppositional to state hegemony (Chivandikwa 2012). This brand of theatre, known as protest theatre, refers to a theatre that directs its efforts towards the subversion of an existing dominant ideology. In Zimbabwe, as elsewhere, protest theatre develops as an alternative platform through which citizens challenge and engage the state on issues of democratic reforms. Protest theatre, thus, aims to provide alternative democratic space (public sphere) where voices that the state-controlled media silenced can deliberate on issues of social and political transformation. Hence, from its inception, protest theatre predicates its practice upon democratic ‘ intentions.