Kuukuwa Manful has been awarded a grant by the British Library Endangered Archives Programme for a project titled ‘Building Early Accra: Preserving Historical Building Permits in Ghana’.
It seeks to digitise extremely at risk and vulnerable architectural and planning records in Accra, Ghana and to make digital versions of the material accessible in perpetuity for current and future scholars.
Kuukuwa will be working on this project from October 2019 alongside fieldwork for her PhD on ‘The Architecture of Education in Ghana’.
About Kuukuwa Manful
Kuukuwa Manful is a Doctoral Researcher at the Department of Politics and International Studies of SOAS, University of London.
She holds Masters degrees in African Studies and Architecture from The Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana and The University of Oxford, UK.
Kuukuwa Manful is the co-founder of Sociarchi, a social architecture enterprise which advocates for and provides architectural services to disadvantaged members of Ghanaian society.
She strongly believes that Africa needs more of her architects to work towards solving the problems of the people who need them the most – who also happen to be the very people who cannot afford architects.
It is for this reason that she founded Sociarchi together with her colleague Emmanuel Ofori-Sarpong.
Sociarchi uses research, advocacy and design to provide sustainable, context-appropriate design solutions for the most vulnerable in society.
Some projects undertaken include the construction of a reading area for disadvantaged children in Omanjor; the retrofitting of a school in Adoagyiri for easy access by disabled children, and researching ways to make Accra’s urban environment more liveable for its inhabitants.
