IASA 2019 Annual Conference

On 11th December, 2019, the Malawi National Commission for UNESCO in collaboration with National Archives of Malawi organised a two-day conference of records management and archives technical professionals. The aim of the conference was to find out the challenges being faced in both private and public institutions charged with managing various types of records including academic, financial, security and personnel records in both paper and audiovisual formats, and with that information suggest possible solutions. The following were some of the challenges that were reported by the 27 institutions that attended the conference: People think the way information is being managed is normal and therefore there is resistance to change; Information is being managed by people who are not professionals in the field; There is no space in the archive rooms which are more or less dumping rooms; Digitization machines and processes are very costly; There is lack of networking among records managers and archivists at national level looking into record management issues in institutions; Of all the more than 17 public and private universities in Malawi only Mzuzu University teaches library information science at degree level and none teaches records management and archiving per se. This presentation will therefore, in pictorial format, present the situation of the 27 institutions that participated in the aforementioned conference particularly their challenges and the solutions they have proposed with the aim of inviting partnerships in the development of relevant training programmes for Malawi.