About the Human Rights Archive Zimbabwe

Welcome to the Human Rights Archive Zimbabwe

This archive is an initiative of the National Transitional Justice Working Group (NTJWG) which is designed to bring to one central place Zimbabwe’s human rights story, one step at a time. The story of this archive dates as far back as October 2012, when stakeholders at the 2012 International Transitional Justice Conference on Zimbabwe resolved that Zimbabwe’s history, truth and justice needs required a coordinated collaborative archival process.

Giving a keynote address at the conference, Dr. Undine Whande said the following words, “There is a need to create spaces where Zimbabwe can have the conversation about itself – past, present and future – as it becomes possible and especially across generations, with young people.”

This message underscores the need for dialogue across generations in order to tackle some of Zimbabwe’s wicked challenges. This is why at the close of the conference, delegates made a firm resolution for a coordinated approach to research, documentation and archiving of information among various actors. That became the conception of this archive. But the actual work was only to begin on 2 March 2017 with reflections among civil society actors on the concrete steps to establishing Zimbabwe’s first Digital Human Rights Archive. Between 2 March 2017 and 1 March 2018, several meetings where held which led to the establishment of Archival Reference Group (ARG) which became the steering team for the establishment of the current Archive. The group met a number of times between 1 March 2018 and 1 February 2019 to work on strategy, data collection tools, review reports and agree on a number of archival policies. When all the technical issues had been ironed out, the Human Rights Archive, Zimbabwe Project began to take shape, going live unofficially on the Uwazi platform on 15 February 2018

Collections and Categories

To date, the Archive has reports, videos, photographs, and audio collections under 11 categories. The categories are

  • Children
  • Displacements
  • Elections
  • Gukurahundi
  • Murambatsvina
  • Politics and Governance
  • Riots
  • Transitional Justice
  • Trauma
  • Women
  • Special Interest
Why the Human Rights Archive

The Human Rights Archive is an ongoing project which is designed to establish and promote the use of, a centralised, publicly accessible digital human rights information for Zimbabwe; while at the same time strengthening the capacity of Zimbabwe’s transitional justice actors to undertake purposive archiving for truth, memory, justice and accountability. Through the Archive, stakeholders are able to digitise and make accessible published human rights materials, to identify and address gaps and silences for constituencies inadequately documented through the collection of new human rights information and sharing it on the Archive.

Ownership of the Information

The archive is entirely digital and hosted on an international platform. The information published on the archive does not belong to the NTJWG but to individual organisations. Stakeholders are able to upload and delete files according to their organisational policies.

Contact Us

To get in touch with the secretariat, please email info@ntjwg.org.zw or call +263 242 770177/8