This March, the British Council’s Cultural Protection Fund unveils the newest recipients of our Digital Heritage Pilot.
Building on CPF’s decade of innovation, this new pilot keeps the momentum going by continuing the conversation from last year’s British Council’s UK/Kenya Season and the landmark Digital Cultural Heritage report. Both showed how practitioners are already using digital tools to protect cultural heritage.
The pilot grant recipients are sinking into a pertinent question facing heritage practitioners today: ‘how is heritage protection shaping and being shaped by digital technology?’
‘This Digital Heritage Pilot is very timely as CPF approaches our tenth anniversary, when we’re both celebrating our past achievements and looking forward to what new technologies can offer the sector. This is particularly when there is greater need than ever for the protection of vitally important cultural heritage across the world,’ said Daniel Head, CPF’s Senior Grants Manager.
Between March to December 2026, CPF has awarded £349,352 to seven projects in four countries. The work spans from labs to VR to AI - where each project explores how digital tools and community-led innovation can work together to safeguard heritage endangered by conflict and climate pressures.
Grants have been awarded to:
- African Digital Heritage will work with Ukombozi Library, Kenya’s largest resistance archive, to repair and digitise thousands of pages, photographs and hours of film that document the country’s social justice movements. By creating a digital repository of these materials, staff and archivists will be trained in ethical and digital heritage management, African Digital Heritage will also produce a methodology blueprint to support other archives impacted by environmental damage accumulated over decades of storage in under-resourced conditions.
- Akamba Cultural Centre and Museum will build strong community and institutional capacity in safeguarding Akamba cultural heritage through the creation of a digital repository of their unique artefacts, traditions, rituals and performances. This work will be supported by training workshops, the establishment of a heritage risk management framework, and a brand new Digital Heritage Laboratory to enable 3D scans and audio visual documentation.
- Crossover Labs, working with Karen Palmer, will take Kenya as a live case study in how Africa can pivot from extraction to stewardship when exploring ethical AI and digital cultural heritage. They will bring Kenyan practitioners together in an Ubuntu-centred 'Hack the Future' lab to generate community-led recommendations. These ideas will inform an immersive governance simulation prototype and a publicly available toolkit to spark wider engagement across arts, heritage, AI and policy sectors.
- Lara Baladi, in collaboration with Lucid Realities, will develop a participatory digital heritage initiative that preserves the rapidly disappearing web records of global social movements. The project will result in Anatomy of Revolution, an open-source online archive. The team will also produce an immersive VR experience where audiences can navigate the online ‘ABC of revolts and revolutions.’ This exploratory gateway into the interconnected histories of collective resistance expands how digital archives can be accessed, experienced, and activated.
- MaritimEA Research will embark on the strategic planning for a future National Digital Heritage Archive to address the lack of a coordinated and sustainable framework that supports the digital preservation of Pakistan’s cultural heritage. Through extensive consultation, MaritimEA Research will map current practices, develop standardised guidelines, and build technical capacity across different organisations. This will culminate into a White Paper that outlines the governance, infrastructure, policies, and a roadmap needed to create a resilient National Digital Heritage Archive.
- Scriptease will document and dramatise the living heritage of East Africa’s Swahili Coast through immersive VR. With climate change weakening the fragile architecture of UNESCO Listed sites Lamu Old Town and Stown Town, this project will lay the foundation for an East African VR Heritage Collection. By stimulating the local creative economy, Scriptease will develop a scalable, ethical model for digital storytelling to ensure that the stories, songs, and memories of Africa’s coastal heritage will endure.
- The Khan’s Institute for Worldmaking will develop the AI and data infrastructure for WRKBK, a digital index documenting craft knowledge across the Arab world. This public platform will allow users to trace connections between workshops, materials, and traditions- starting with Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine, and expanding to additional contexts. In doing so, this work surfaces the historical interdependence and socio-economic patterns often overlooked in conventional heritage preservation efforts.
‘We’re incredibly excited at the Cultural Protection Fund about the range of these projects,’ continues Daniel Head. ‘The work planned is truly innovative and will help global heritage practitioners better understand how a broad span of digital technologies can be used to safeguard heritage for future generations.’
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