The board of FIDA met on 26 September and welcomed Sarah Choy from Hong Kong and Sharon Alexander-Gooding of Barbados as trustees to the meeting.
The Fund is designed to help archivists help themselves and their organisations in low-resourced environments so that they can improve their own archival and records management capacity. It is complementary to PCOM which serves the wider archival community. The Trustees considered 20 applications for funding from countries from west, south and east Africa, southern and south-eastern Europe, the Middle East and south Asia.
 As a result of its deliberations some of the applications were considered more appropriate to be considered by ICA’s Africa Strategy under the auspices of PCOM and others were thought to be of interest to the Endangered Archives Programme, administered by the British Library, which focusses on digitising early archives at risk. So far FIDA has funded Lebanon’s Arab Image Foundation and Senegal’s digital document managing training programme. Others remain under negotiation.
 
 
FIDA always contributes showcase session to the ICA professional programme.
 
This year it featured the Trustees and two speakers representing successfully completed workshops funded in part by FIDA. The first presentation was given by Cassie Findlay (Australia) for the digital records training programme Record Keeping for Good Governance Training the Trainers organised by Helen Gadzekpo Head of the Public Records and Archives Administration Department (PRAAD) in Ghana 7-11 Sept 2015. This workshop over 5 days was intensive and directed at all those who deal with records in the administration as well as in archives. Supported by the Head of Civil Service, this programme of training will encourage training across the whole government record keeping sector. The second presentation was given by Richard Wato the secretary-general of ESARBICA on behalf of Ivan Murambiwa the vice-president, who hosted the ESARBICA conference in June in Harare. The workshop on the ‘Management and preservation of electronic records’ was a one-day pre-conference workshop.  347 junior archivists, records managers and other information practitioners attended this workshop.   The facilitators for this workshop were James Lowry and Victor Nduna.  Although the workshop was well organised and successful it is clear that a one-day workshop is not enough. It is to be hoped that under the ICA Africa strategy this essential training can be given on a more regular basis.