Collaboration project with the National Archive of the Sahrawi People Sahrawi

Start Year: 2007 – End Year: Ongoing

In response to a request from those responsible for the National Archive of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic to Archivists Without Borders, a survey study of the documentary collections was carried out in order to detect and prioritize the needs of the Sahrawis regarding the organization of their National Archive, located in the camps of Tindouf (Algeria).

As a result of the study, the need to provide basic training in archival science to the personnel responsible for the archive was detected in order to provide them with a working methodology, in accordance with international archival doctrine, that would allow them to manage their documentary collections. Within this framework, several aid workers traveled to the Sahrawi camps in Tindouf (Algeria) in 2007 to begin training in archival science. Likewise, in 2009, archivists from the Sahrawi National Archive traveled to several archival centers in Spain in order to learn about the organization and operation of these archive centers. Among the objectives of this project is to condition the building and infrastructure of the Archive in order to improve the conditions of custody and conservation of the documentation, and the way to be able to remunerate the workers of this archive is also being studied.

In March 2008, a 4×4 car was purchased to facilitate archival tasks in the camps; this will facilitate the transfer of documentation between the wilayas and the Sahrawi National Archive, and travel between all the Sahrawi refugee camps.

Since 2010, AsF has contributed to intensively disseminating the archive project in numerous sessions, explaining the unique and peculiar case of this archive located in Tindouf, in refugee camps located in Algeria and where more than 170,000 refugees from Western Sahara are located.

In 2018, members of the AsF board traveled there to check the state of the facilities and the urgent needs of the archive, given that the climatic conditions of the area make it difficult to maintain the documentation kept in the archive in good condition.

On September 21, 2022, at the 9th Annual Conference of the International Council on Archives (ICA) and under the title Archives: Bridging the Gap, the opportunity was taken to make known at an international level the tasks carried out in this archive and its importance in terms of the memory of the Sahrawi people.