safeguarding sudan's living heritage - final evaluation report

new resource added.

As much as possible, we encourage clients to approve the sharing of the evaluation reports from their projects. It's good practice and for good reason. Not only does it help celebrate their achievements and show transparency about how resources have been invested, it also shows learning for other organisations, communities, professionals, and groups to build on, to avoid reinventing wheels or repeating mistakes and wasting valuable resources doing so.

So we're really pleased that Mallinson Architects - the leaders and facilitators of the Safeguarding Sudan's Living Heritage project, funded by the British Council Cultural Protection Fund in partnership with DCMS - have agreed to sharing their reports.

This is definitely one of the most challenging projects we've ever evaluated. We have nothing but huge admiration for the team. The British Council Cultural Protection fund exists to protect heritage at risk from environmental and political threats. The threat and risk on this project became very real as dramatic and violent conflict erupted suddenly, almost without warning, in the very spaces activity was happening. Of course the first step was to make sure everyone was safe, and all activity stopped to put the wellbeing of the team first. Incredibly, after a few months people started to come back to the project and carry on doing what they could, from wherever they had relocated to. Sadly a lot of the collections and sites involved were damaged beyond recognition, and some of the digitisation went with them. In other cases, the cataloguing and digitisation that happened means that over time, it will be possible to find out exactly what artefacts have gone. Some of the documentation created in this project will be the only record of the heritage that existed. A very real and immediate impact of the work.

At times it seemed pointless trying to evaluate a project like this where human safety was the only thing that mattered. We were encouraged by the hope, determination, optimism, creativity and need for connection and joy the team displayed. We wanted to do them justice in reflecting on the achievements they realised. And as the only live cataloguing project we were aware of that continued during active war time, there were some rare opportunities to look at what it means to preserve living (or intangible) heritage, and how that heritage - precisely because it is enacted as the continuation of centuries of tradition - can really create connection and help people feel close to their roots when life changes beyond recognition.
You can:

• ​Find the final report, executive summary, and appendices here
• Click on the picture above for the full report.
• Read evaluation reports from other clients and their projects on our reports page.
• Visit the Safeguarding Sudan's Living Heritage LinkedIn page or website.