African-European Museum Partnership

The African-European Museum Partnership is a five-year initiative bringing together a network of museums across Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe to co-create exhibitions, strengthen collections, and empower the next generation of museum professionals. It represents a fundamental shift in how cultural cooperation between Africa and Europe works. Rather than technical assistance flowing in one direction, we have built a program that places African museums and professionals at the centre, co-designing the work, leading the proposals, and setting the agenda.

The AEMP builds museum partnerships rooted in co-creation, equal ownership, and the transformation of cultural narratives between two continents through three interconnected pillars: exhibitions, collections and empowerment. The program ensures that African museums and professionals remain the primary agents of their own development.

Our exhibitions pillar redefines what co-creation actually means. Museums apply in consortia through open calls for proposals, designing projects together from the first idea to the final exhibition. This pillar supports permanent improvements and existing collections in African institutions, as well as new temporary exhibitions co-curated across the network. We invest in the process as much as the product, because the professional relationships built during a co-curation process are themselves the point.

Our collections work confronts the hardest questions in the sector head-on: who catalogued this object, who has access to it, what would digitisation make possible and for whom. This pillar funds the full lifecycle of collection management, from conservation and inventory to provenance co-research and community engagement. The goal is collections that are activated.

Our empowerment pillar is our most significant long-term investment: fellowships of up to nine months for museum professionals based in Sub-Saharan Africa, a Professional Peer Learning Fund that puts resources directly in the hands of practitioners, think tanks where museum directors work through the strategic questions of new African museology together, and joint learning programs built across disciplines, career levels, and language communities.

AEMP Launch Event