Neem is a collective of people passionate about the rich diversity of human intangible cultural heritage.
Every two weeks a language disappears due to climate, conflict or wider demographic change, taking with it priceless knowledge, worldviews, songs and stories.
Our platform, built from the bottom up with low-resource communities, gives those closest to heritage control to document, define, and celebrate these invaluable treasures.
Public use Neem in Gedaref, Sudan, 2025
Public use Neem in Gedaref, Sudan, 2025
We use mobile applications and AI to enable low cost and locally-led cultural heritage documentation campaigns, at a scale and pace that meets humanity’s cultural crisis. Our goal is to support 5000 communities within 5 years.
Our platform connects people to archives, wherever they are, through the most simple smartphone. Because taking the archives to the people is a matter of both justice and peace. Our goal is to help 1000 archives within 5 years.
We use our decentralised applications and AI to meet the global cultural crisis. Our goal is to help accelerate community-led documentation, build AI that reflects human diversity, and work with major social media companies to harness latent content.
We work with communities and partners to celebrate diversity across conflict lines, strengthen cultural resilience and improve inter-community understanding. We aim to contribute to a more inclusive understanding of humanity today, and for the millennia to come.
Intangible cultural heritage management should be controlled, defined and safeguarded by those closest to it.
Neem recognizes the importance of all people’s intangible cultural heritage regardless of levels of political or economic interest.
We recognise the importance of all intangible cultural heritage regardless of levels of political or economic interest.
Neem shall not duplicate or compete with any other initiative.
We fully endorse the UNESCO twelve ethical principles for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage (Decision 10.COM 15.a).
We fully endorse the UNESCO twelve ethical principles for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage (Decision 10.COM 15.a).
We fully endorse the UNESCO twelve ethical principles for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage (Decision 10.COM 15.a).
We fully endorse the UNESCO twelve ethical principles for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage (Decision 10.COM 15.a).
We fully endorse the UNESCO twelve ethical principles for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage (Decision 10.COM 15.a).
We fully endorse the UNESCO twelve ethical principles for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage (Decision 10.COM 15.a).
We fully endorse the UNESCO twelve ethical principles for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage (Decision 10.COM 15.a).
The unprecedented cultural loss ongoing requires the biggest campaign in community-led cultural heritage collection ever. It is right that communities have control over what is collected and how it is defined. The Neem APP gives them a tool to do this.
We also believe that making available our existing archives to the public is the right thing to do and will help promote social cohesion too. And we now have the technology to ensure that they are available to everyone, especially those closest to the heritage records who have been so often excluded.
1. The crisis: Humanity undergoing a process of unprecedented cultural change leading to the disappearance of vast tracts of priceless intangible heritage. Even before the current conflict over 45 languages are severely or critically endangered. (UNESCO, Endangered Languages Project).
2. The opportunity: We are at a historic moment not far from ‘peak culture’. A huge body of intangible cultural heritage is still present, held particularly by elder generations. Millions of musical forms, songs, stories and knowledge of unknown richness will disappear. Much of this is now inevitable.
3. The method: More and more people have both a collective awareness of the value of their intangible cultural heritage and access to a technology that can help them be part of our response. An Android APP makes possible community-led cultural heritage collection at scale. This will both raise awareness of the importance of safeguarding heritage and document 1000s of priceless elements before they are lost.
Neem is guided by 5 overarching principles of engagement. These reflect lessons learned and build upon best practice within the wider cultural heritage sector:
1. Decentralization: Intangible cultural heritage should be defined and safeguarded by agents of the communities that produce and maintain it.
2. Control: Control over the management, sustainability and use of intangible cultural heritage should remain with the agents and communities who produce and maintain it. For example, whilst contributing heritage posts will make posts public, the user retains full and direct control over their content and can edit or remove it from the platform at any time.
3. Do no harm: 7oshna will cause no harm to enabling conditions for the creation, enactment and transmission of intangible cultural heritage, and will actively engage in their promotion where possible.
4. Inclusivity: 7oshna recognizes the importance of all Sudan’s intangible cultural heritage regardless of levels of political or economic interest.
5. Coordination and complementarity: 7oshna shall not duplicate or compete with any other initiative.
In addition to these principles, the ICGP fully endorses the UNESCO twelve ethical principles for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage (Decision 10.COM 15.a).
Cultural heritage goes beyond physical structures such as monuments or objects. It includes a truly awe-inspiring richness of oral traditions, songs, stories, social practices, craft work, ritual, festive events as well as knowledge and theories concerning nature and the universe. The knowledge and skills associated with these practices is intangible cultural heritage.
– Oral traditions and storytelling
– Songs, music, dance and children gams.
– Festive events
– Knowledge concerning nature and the universe
– Crafts
This is so critically important for at least 5 reasons:
Social: To maintain and respect diversity within and across communities encourages positive identities, mutual respect and intercultural dialogue. In Sudan, for example, this is an urgent part of any comprehensive approach to building a peaceful country.
Scientific: To maintain and safeguard valuable historical narratives, scientific understandings, and spiritual insights.
Economic: The functions of intangible cultural heritage within society can contribute to economic benefits for communities and states.
Public policy: The use of oral history to improve public policies and programmes is an expanding transdisciplinary practice.
Aesthetic: Last but absolutely not least. For the enjoyment and inspiration of human beings in the millennia to come.
We work with governments, universities, and community groups.
To give an example, in Sudan, our partner is the University of Khartoum. This hosts one of the most important audio-visual Archives of Sudanese ICH. This contains more than 6000 recorded hours of irreplaceable ICH documentation in a variety of formats, as well as a small museum of artefacts.
This “TRAMA” archive (Traditional Music Archive) contains audio-visual material and written field-work notes collected since 1964, when the Sudan Research Unit (SRU) was established.
The Archive is a vast collection of 3270 audio reel tapes, 1420 audio cassettes, 70 DAT (covering 3900 hours of audio recording), 146 U-Matic video tapes, 91 VHS video tapes, 136 Betacam tapes, 175 Mini-DV, and approximately 1000 photos, all of which have been indexed with historic support of the Ford Foundation.
All of this physical material remains in Khartoum at grave risk of destruction by the current conflict.
Examples of content include:
Sudanese musical cultures: E.g. conflict affected heritage such as the Nuba Al-Kambala dance and the unique Waza trumpets of the Berta.
Oral literature: E.g. people’s histories covering Mahdist revolt; the 1928 revolution; the modern history of the Sudanese National movement.
Proverbs: E.g. the social proverbs of customary law in Darfurian communities collected 1964-2000.
Rituals: E.g. the Sufi practices from 1964-2000 including the use of spiritual stimulants in context; and the Kujur rituals of Nuba.
Narratives: E.g. ‘Joke’s from the struggles against dictatorship; folktales and poetry from Sudanese communities across the country.
Handicrafts and traditional children’s games: Artefacts from across Sudan dating back to the 1870s.
Other indigenous knowledge and skills: Unique knowledge and skills that identify and define societies within Sudan.
Neem deeply respects and values the dedicated work of many other existing initiatives to safeguard intangible cultural heritage. We believe our project complements these by making available archives to the public, and by making contributions in the following areas:
Pace: Existing approaches to safeguarding intangible cultural heritage focus on high fidelity. These are wonderful but slow. They cannot respond to the urgent need for documentation at scale.
Cost: Existing approaches to safeguarding intangible cultural heritage are relatively expensive, often involving international travel and costly equipment.
Control: Existing approaches tend to centralize decision making, categorization, archiving and prioritize access to international networks.
Representation: Existing approaches frequently focus upon flagship examples of intangible cultural heritage or have limited coverage dependent upon donor interest, leaving hard-to-reach or minority under-represented.
Connectedness: Many existing archives are disconnected, hard to find, or difficult to navigate. Others are available on wonderful sites like Sudan Memory. Our platform offers an additional channel for the public to discover records of their heritage.
Legal: Legal questions and dilemmas around cultural property are still in development.
Our Community Ambassadors are usually selected by an inclusive group of community members engaged in cultural activity. Community ambassadors take the lead in telling people about Neem and documenting elements for their own cultures that they feel are important to collect.
If you would like to become a Community Ambassador for your cultural heritage or community please just get in touch.
We have received funding from the British Council, Internews and USAID. However, we are independent of these, and any other organisations, and we will only ever carry out our activity in line with our core values and our mission to empower communities to access and safeguard their cultural heritage.
Neem has completed long term pilots in Sudan and South Sudan and is seeking partnerships to scale up. We have also been restoring elements from digitized archives and will now be making them available as they are completed. This is a time consuming process that involves digital treatment, and updating the description and metadata for each. So keep checking back and follow us on our socials to see the content grow over time. We are also exploring partnerships to see how our tool can be most useful to communities.
Would you like to run a campaign to document your at-risk heritage? Do you think we can do something to use community heritage to help social cohesion? Let’s start a campaign! There are many ways you can help from following and interacting with us on socials, collecting heritage in the APP, to assisting with metadata or finding funding opportunities. Please get in touch.
