2020 NigerHeritage Conference (Chicago)
The 2020 conference brought core committee members from Niger, Paris and DC to Chicago for three full-day planning sessions to reconfigure design and construction elements for new, confirmed location sites
NigerHeritage has developed over the course of the last three years into an exciting and ambitious cultural preservation and education and capacity-building initiative, dedicated to Niger’s unique, world-class paleontological, archaeological and cultural heritage with two iconic new museum destinations. The first, Musée du Fleuve, showcases dinosaur and human fossils on a picturesque island of the Niger in central Niamey, and the second, Musée du Désert Vivant, is a novel cultural and natural history museum that celebrates desert life and history in Agadez, the cultural heart of Niger.
From the start, the NigerHeritage projects were designed and fine-tuned through a series of robust dialogue and engaging, idea-generating conferences with Nigerien ministers, mayors, council members, architects, university rectors and scholars and cultural and religious figureheads, the most recent of which was held in Chicago in January of 2020. This conference brought core committee members from Niger, Paris and DC to Chicago for three full-day planning sessions at Stantec offices in Chicago to reconfigure design and construction elements for new, confirmed location sites. The core team also developed plans for a marketing and funding strategy for the coming year.
