Gladys Kemboi is a doctoral student in Information Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
My name is Gladys Kemboi. I am a doctoral student in Information Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. My research and interests focus on knowledge management, digital preservation, decolonisation of knowledge, community archives and local and Indigenous knowledge in development. Over the past years I have been collaborating with leaders, partners and communities across the globe to digitize and preserve local and Indigenous knowledge in development. Through the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) support, I have made significant contributions and extended our digital preservation efforts to preserve local and Indigenous knowledge in Africa.
The urgency to preserve Africa’s heritage emerged from my motivation and collaboration with Folasade Adepoju of National Library of Nigeria, and founder of Youth Initiative for Literacy and Cultural Orientation (YILCO). As we celebrate 2026 World Digital Preservation Day, we celebrate the impact and collaboration in (1) saving humanitarian archives and health knowledge in danger, (2) web archiving, and (3) catalysing African community archives for social good.
Saving Humanitarian Archives and Health Knowledge in Danger
Humanitarian knowledge and local knowledge is disappearing across the sectors due to funding cuts, conflict, failing digital infrastructure, and climate change, leading to the loss of operational records, community data, protection documentation, evaluation, and institutional memory. In particular, archives held by local and national organisations are the most vulnerable and the least protected.
Through our collaboration with Humanitarian Archive Emergency (HAE) at the University of Manchester, I led a successful convening in September, 2026, which brought together practitioners working in humanitarian, academia, government, UN agencies, INGOs, and national NGOs, as well as in humanitarian, health, archives, universities, and government. The countries represented include Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, and South Sudan.
The HAE raises the visibility of collections at risk and foster connections between invaluable repositories and institutions, expertise, and resources to facilitate the rescue of the archives of displaced communities (Kemboi, Marshall, & Stickland, 2026). During the 2026 World Digital Preservation Day, we celebrate the HAE public registry, created to map the risks and collectively assess the scope and scale of humanitarian archives, records, and datasets. The registry is open to all individuals, organizations and communities across the world (see https://hae-registry.baserow.site/registry).
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Figure 1: HAE members at the Nairobi convening, Kenya, September 7–8, 2026. Figure 2: HAE members during the visit at Kenya National Archives in Nairobi.
It is also worth celebrating the health archives and heritage in Africa. Within the HAE community, we collaborate with health organisations in Africa to save health data, archives and records. At Amref Health Africa, Nicky Blundell, custodian of Amref Heritage, is leading volunteers working to preserve audiovisual and health archives from Somalia and Sudan. Nicky has spent over 50 years preserving health archives at Amref Heritage (Mwenda, 2026).
The digital collection includes health-promotion programs. Preserving these resources is crucial for public-health knowledge as well as fostering knowledge exchange among the communities. “We hope to restore some files and digitise health archives, which include the first-hand narratives, original minutes, and an AV conversion story - 16 mm training films made in the 1960s on anesthesia and worms,” Nicky.
Saving Our Web Archives
As part of our ongoing digital preservation and preservation of Indigenous knowledge and cultural heritage in Africa, the Youth Initiative for Literacy and Cultural Orientation (YILCO) launched the Web Archiving education in Africa to train and equip librarians, archivists, curators and information professionals across Africa with the technical tools and skills to preserve Africa's digital memory for future generations (see www.yilco.org).
Catalysing African Community Archives for Social Good
The Catalyzing African Community Archives for Social Good project is developing a reciprocal partnership among the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, African partners, DPC, Knowledge Management for Development (KM4Dev), and international digital preservation/knowledge management organizations and networks. The partnership fosters the preservation of modern documentary materials, enabling Africans to tell their stories in their terms. Within a project governance model that centers African voices and supports community archivists, Indigenous knowledge holders, and individuals interested in the preservation of heritage(see https://cacasg.library.illinois.edu/).
Resources
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Catalyzing African Community Archives for Social Good. (n.d.). Catalyzing African community archives for social good. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. https://cacasg.library.illinois.edu/
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Humanitarian Archive Emergency. (n.d.). Landscape report. https://humanitarianarchiveemergency.com/#report
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Kemboi, G., Marshall, D., & Stickland, C. (2026). Strategic Work and Ideas at the Humanitarian Archive Emergency Project. Displaced Voices: A Journal of Migration, Archives and Cultural Heritage. https://www.livingrefugeearchive.org/displaced-voices-volume-5-issue-1/
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Mwenda, Brian. (2026, August 10). From London to Kenya: Nicky Blundell’s 54-year journey preserving Amref’s heritage. Amref Health Africa.https://newsroom.amref.org/editors-picks/2026/08/from-london-to-kenya-nicky-blundells-54-year-journey-preserving-amrefs-heritage/amp/
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Youth Initiative for Literacy and Cultural Orientation. (n.d.). Web archiving fellowship 2026. https://www.yilco.org/Digital%20literacy%20lab.html