For many decades, heritage in Sudan has been a battleground between the diverse political, religious and ethnic forces. This is affecting the way in which the educational and curriculum development processes are organized and how the acquisitions of public libraries, including the National Library, are selected. For many years, books...
This paper considers the special challenges of creating and accessing knowledge material relating to the global South, especially from locations in the South. The imbalance between North and South in the creation of knowledge resources is linked to their unequal access to extant resources, but the link is not always...
In this presentation I shall introduce the work of the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project. It began as an attempt to understand the tradition of learning in Timbuktu as represented in the large number of manuscript books kept in the town. However, it has expanded into a larger consideration of various issues...
This talk is inspired by the book that I recently co-authored with Rigas Arvanitis Knowledge Production in the Arab World: The Impossible Promise. (2016). I will show a paradox: Arab knowledge production has tremendously increased but often without being translated into public awareness and policy. What does mean in terms...
Provision of education at all levels has always been one of the, if not the, most important expectation that Africans demand of their governments. In the twenty-first century even a bachelor’s degree is no longer good enough for the few available government jobs or for those in the private sector....