This year in Yaoundé, the capital city of Cameroon, the ICA’s Expert Group on Archive Buildings & Environments (EGABE) held a morning workshop on Tuesday, November 27th, to address some of the issues inherent in the management and maintenance of archives storage, and the impacts of buildings, with particular emphasis on African building provision. This workshop built on the successful model continued at the Mexico City conference in 2017. This year, the workshop presentations focused on the findings of a short survey of African archives carried out by the EGABE in partnership with the ICA Africa Strategy committee at the end of 2017.
 
The workshop was split into three distinct sections each dealing with a particular area of buildings and collection care. Each section presented the attendees with some issues to address in their groups, and for this to be a point of discussion for the workshop. Jonathan Rhys- Lewis, chair of EGABE, presented the workshop. The subjects that were covered:
 
Sustainability & renewables – to be a review of “green” solutions and their applicability for archives;
Specifying archival buildings – with the emphasis on the Africa buildings survey and the recently published European standard on specifying heritage buildings;
Archival packaging – the role of packaging and the first line of defence and how it supports overall collection care.
 
9 participants attended the workshop session and represented a range of African countries and elsewhere including, Haiti, Macao, and the United States. After each formal presentation (each lasted about 30 minutes), the participants broke into groups to discuss the set scenarios, and further comments encouraged. The general feel of the workshop was very positive and some interesting and challenging discussions took place.