In 2021, the Women’s History Museum of Zambia (WHMZ) and the Swedish National Museums of World Culture—custodians of the Etnografiska Museet in Stockholm—launched Shared Histories, a collaborative digital interface for sharing Zambian historical collections held in Sweden. With funding from the Swedish Institute, and with groundwork laid through 2020 workshops in the Gwembe Valley, Shared Histories pursued what its team called “metadata healing”: returning context, oral memory, and the voices of original makers to objects that had spent decades in collections without them. It was a project about access, but more pointedly about who gets to author the record.

SummitShare began with a question posed inside another project. It was within this work that a further question surfaced. If digital media could carry an artefact across distance and recover the knowledge attached to it, could the same medium also carry value, ownership, and verifiable history back to the communities the objects came from? A large percentage of Africa’s material cultural heritage now sits in Western institutions, and physical restitution remains tangled in geopolitics and logistics. Shared Histories had shown that digital access was viable. The open question was whether digital infrastructure could unlock a second dimension of access: not only to seeing an object, but to participating in its ongoing life, contributing to its record, and sharing in the value it generates while abroad.

SummitShare was later founded to test that question. Blockchains, often discussed only as financial rails, can also be read as a history technology—a permanent ledger for inscribing provenance and the journey of an object through time. By minting a digital cast of an artefact and binding it to smart contracts, an object can circulate as a unique, traceable record while keeping its connection to a community of origin. Ticket revenue from an exhibition in Europe can route, transparently, to custodians in Zambia. Researchers, curators, and community members can engage with the same digital surface from different sides of the world. Provenance becomes a living, multi-authored document rather than a closed museum record.

The first SummitShare exhibit, “The Leading Ladies of Zambia” series by the Women’s History Museum, was launched in December 2024. Drawing on six artefacts associated with trailblazing Zambian women, it operated as an end-to-end pilot: a virtual environment for object encounter, a smart contract escrow that split ticket revenue 80/20 in favor of linked communities, and a field engagement across the Gwembe Valley in which cooperatives identified objects, contributed oral provenance, and submitted community-ranked development proposals tied to tranche-based funding. Two of the six artefacts were recognized in the field, oral histories enriched their records, and existing cooperative governance proved compatible with the model without requiring new local institutions.

SummitShare is now being rebuilt as open infrastructure. Ticketing has given way to open access, and the next version is designed for institutions, independent curators, and communities to host their own exhibits, manage metadata collaboratively, and decide for themselves whether and how to attach revenue, contribution, or governance layers. Digital visibility, we believe, is a precondition for physical return: a community cannot ask for what it does not know exists. SummitShare’s role is to keep that surface open, plural, and participatory, so that more custodians, on more terms, can take part in how heritage is documented, encountered, and returned. The bridge between tradition and technology is not a single crossing; it is a place where many people meet.

Project title: SummitShare
SummitShare Collective: Daniel Tembo, Mario M. Jere, Nhyira J. Amofa-Sekyi, Taonga D. Macashini, Thomas M. Gondwe
Originating partner and Shared Histories Project Leads: Women’s History Museum of Zambia (WHMZ), co-founded by Mulenga Kapwepwe and Samba Yonga, through whose Shared Histories initiative the project was conceived.
Institutional collaborator Shared Histories: Etnografiska Museet, part of the Swedish National Museums of World Culture (Stockholm). Michael Barrett, Andrea Davis Kronlund
Funding and program support: Swedish Institute (Creative Force grant, Shared Histories); Ethereum Foundation (Next Billion Fellowship); Octant (accelerator and Streaming Quadratic Funding round).
Early contributors: Hanan Haj Ahmed (design); Q (initial smart contract and subgraph design).

SummitShare stands as a pioneering digital platform dedicated to the repatriation of African cultural artifacts. Bridging the past and present, it serves as a beacon of hope and a testament to the resilience of African heritage, utilizing technology to reclaim, celebrate, and share the rich tapestry of Africa’s history with the world. The artefacts in this collection are unnamed, not because their makers were unknown, but because no one thought to record them. As these objects changed hands and left the continent, in some cases over 110 years ago, the people behind them were quietly erased. They represent several tribes and several people across Africa; Luvale, Bisa, Mbunda, Batwa, and Lungu could be their nationalities; Zambian, Tanzanian, Angolan, or even Congolese. What we know for certain, however, is that the objects endure to this today, but what is lost is everything else.

SummitShare is a blockchain integrated digital platform of Zambian colonial artefacts held in Western institutions. The multi-continental collaboration between the Ethnographic Museum, the Women’s History Museum of Zambia (WHMZ), the Swedish National Museum of World Cultures, and Summit Share engages in a direct conversation of reparation through transparent open digital infrastructures.  
The WHMZ digital repository contains documentation of a plethora of cultural traditions, artefacts, and spiritualities that colonial governments and museums actively attempted to erase through theft, misrepresentation, and false narratives that invoked fear and distrust of indigenous African traditions. This knowledge was lost, removed from their context, and many are still housed in Western institutions where there is no intention of return. WHMZ subverts these colonial systems of erasure and harm by creating a decentralized archive that exists only online, co-created with local women custodians.  The platform is hosted on end-to-end digital infrastructure fully developed in-house. 
The Zambian Women’s History Museum is directly linked to the anticolonial movement that resulted in Zambia’s independence in 1964—where history lauds men, the museum recognizes indigenous women as the embodiment of freedom in their central position of the preservation of pre-colonial cultural heritage. SummitShare moves beyond performative recognition to restitution justice through integrated value distribution mechanisms. Transparency in the processes proves trust and accountability are in-built in digital infrastructures which dictate methodologies of knowledge harvesting and ownership. 
Open-source tools were applied for 3D capture, photogrammetry workflows, and decentralized storage. The application of blockchain infrastructure for artifact documentation is testament to a commitment to transparency, shifting power to formerly disenfranchised communities. The digital museum is not only focused on salvaging the past, but also in imagining a future outside the bounds and borders imposed during the colonial era. Power is returned and retained by the indigenous knowledge custodians—technology only serving as a medium.
The jury unanimously chose SummitShare for the Golden Nica because of the ingrained care taken into the actualization of the platform, the ingenious application of decentralized emerging technologies in a rapidly evolving tech context, and the decolonial act taken of centering indigenous women custodians from Zambia.