Manful receives MEAP grant to digitize architecture archives in Ghana

Kuukuwa Manful, Ph.D., assistant professor of architecture at Taubman College, has been awarded a grant from UCLA’s Modern Endangered Archives Program (MEAP) for her project to digitize architecture archives in Ghana.

Selected out of a record 206 applications, “Digitizing Archives of Architecture in Ghana” aims to digitize endangered architectural material in Ghana, making it openly accessible and available in perpetuity while stirring enthusiasm for using, preserving, and advocating for archives. 

The project is part of the Accra Archive Initiative and builds upon an earlier project, “Building Early Accra: Preserving Historical Building Permits in Ghana,” which was featured on BBC News and successfully digitized a collection of architectural archives created between the 1900s and 1940s, when Ghana was under colonial rule as the Gold Coast. 

The archive to be digitized contains documents dating from the early 1900s to the 2010s. Manful says it is among the oldest and only records of British colonial administration still available in Ghana. It is also the oldest and largest set of documentary evidence of modern-era architecture, urban planning, land and property ownership, and real estate history pertaining to Ghana held anywhere in the world. “The importance and rarity of the material cannot be overstated and yet without this intervention, it is in danger of being lost forever,” she says.

Lead Image: Scanning archival documents. Image by Charles Lawson