African Cultural Regeneration Institute
African Cultural Regeneration Institute (ACRI) is an International NGO registered in 2003, in Kenya with the aim of promoting African cultural values that Africa can use for her development today as well as for lending to the emerging global family.
Today, useful indigenous African cultural values have been eroded by westernization, modernism and postmodernism to the extent that the new generation of Africans do not know about their cultural heritage and traditions in spite of the fact that these may be valuable cultural assets for humanity as a whole.
ACRI is an accredited NGO to the 2003 UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) Convention which celebrates and promotes the living heritage of mankind since 2010. A member of the network of Accredited NGO’s on ICH,Served in the Consultative Body UNESCO/ICH from 2010-2012.
Since 2003, we have been involved in cultural research, writing publications, production of audio-visual materials, hosting conferences with partners e.g. sculpture symposiums, campaign for culture conferences, training workshops for county governments in Kenya, holding performing arts events, currently working on development of a creative and cultural hub on 2 acres in an urban location availed by ACRI Directors to support and grow the creative cultural activities of the youth into successful global careers.
Many of these activities have been successfully achieved in collaboration and partnership with various government and private sector organisations as well as individuals working on projects of mutual interest.
Javier Péres de Cuéllar, former Secretary-General of UNESCO (1982-1991), summarized issues that became ACRI’s concerns as follows:
“(…) why we must find ways of allowing peoples from every part of the planet to contribute to ‘modernity’ in their own terms; and why it is vitally important to preserve our diverse heritages in an era so rich in the potential for even deeper mutual enrichment yet so fraught with the menace of homogenization (…) and how to deal with the paradoxes of globalization? How to find order and meaning in a world disorder full of uncertainty, incoherence and injustice? How to claim a space for locally rooted culture yet take part in shared, planetary processes? How, in a word, to elaborate their own models of development? (...) (Unesco Courier, September, 1996, pp. 5-6).