UNESCO explores collaboration with the University of Cape Town to strengthen World Heritage higher education in Africa

From 16 to 17 April 2026, UNESCO undertook a contact and scoping mission to the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa, in the framework of the project “Institutionalising and strengthening capacity development to support the identification and safeguarding of cultural and natural World Heritage in Africa”, implemented with the generous support of the Korean Heritage Service, Republic of Korea.

The mission aimed to assess UCT’s current heritage-related teaching, research and postgraduate supervision, and to explore the possibility of enhancing these initiatives through a robust, up-to-date curriculum on World Heritage within the university. Within the Africa-wide project, UCT is considered a potential Southern African node, with strong capacity to contribute to World Heritage curriculum development, critical heritage scholarship, public culture, urban transformation and the under-represented field of Modern Heritage of Africa, thereby offering a potential pathway for establishing a UNESCO-supported heritage platform.

UCT’s participation brought together 16 staff members from the Faculties of Humanities, Engineering and the Built Environment, and Science, with additional university-level participation from Institutional Planning. Represented units included African Studies and Linguistics, Archaeology, Anthropology, Historical Studies, the Department for the Study of Religions, Michaelis Art History and Visual Culture, the School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics, Global Digital Heritage Africa, the African Centre for Cities, and Environmental and Geographical Science. The mission also engaged 35 master’s and doctoral students.

Over two days, discussions examined UCT’s existing strengths in heritage teaching and research, including conservation of the built environment, urban and public-culture approaches, African Studies, archaeology and digital heritage documentation. The mission confirmed that UCT already possesses substantial and diverse heritage expertise, while noting that this expertise is distributed across several departments and would benefit from a coherent, cross-disciplinary platform.

Modern Heritage of Africa emerged as a promising thematic anchor for future collaboration, linking architecture, planning, public culture, memory, archaeology, environmental analysis, digital documentation and African-centred knowledge production. Participants also explored possible institutional models, including a Heritage Resource Centre or a research centre developed in line with UCT’s governance framework.

Looking ahead, UNESCO and UCT will continue working towards a phased roadmap. Immediate steps include undertaking deeper internal mapping, preparing a joint concept note, and identifying pilot activities such as seminars, curriculum mapping, student engagement and short professional courses. If carefully developed, UCT could become an intellectually distinctive and regionally significant node within the emerging UNESCO-supported network of World Heritage higher education in Africa.

For further information, please contact: Rouran Zhang, Programme Coordinator, UNESCO World Heritage Centre: [email protected]