Preserving Indigenous Knowledge through Older Adults in Ghana: Challenges and Information Management Strategies

Abstract

The dominant framing of indigenous knowledge preservation as a technological problem, solvable through better documentation tools, digital archives, and metadata systems, misdiagnoses what is actually at stake in Ghana. Knowledge held by older adults does not decay because it lacks a recording device. It decays because the social conditions that make it meaningful, transmissible, and worth transmitting are eroding. This narrative review argues that any preservation framework oriented primarily toward capture rather than toward the renewal of community conditions is likely to produce archives that communities do not use, do not control, and do not trust. Drawing on peer-reviewed literature published primarily between 2018 and
2025, with selective reference to foundational works where these provide irreplaceable empirical baselines, the review maps the principal forms of elder-held knowledge in Ghana, spanning traditional medicine, oral traditions, agricultural adaptation, and governance, and analyses the structural challenges that impede their intergenerational transmission. It then synthesises information management strategies organised around the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (UNESCO, 2003) and the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance (Carroll et al., 2020), two frameworks chosen precisely because 
they centre community authority and collective benefit rather than institutional efficiency. The review also insists on a point that preservation literature tends to avoid: not all indigenous knowledge is equally valued or uniformly beneficial within the communities that hold it, and preservation frameworks that bypass community
deliberation about what deserves to be preserved, and on whose terms, risk romanticising tradition rather than serving communities. Sustainable preservation depends less on technology than on trust, community selfdetermination, and policies grounded in Ghana’s existing institutional landscape