Africa CCO and Co-President Sergio Gordilho, the agency’s Director of Institutional Relations & Sustainability Raphael Vandystadt and Special Projects Manager Juliana Leite discuss their work with UNESCO and Minecraft.

Brazilian agency Africa was approached by UNESCO to recreate heritage sites destroyed by wars and conflicts in an interdisciplinary educational project hosted inside popular game Minecraft. By placing these destroyed monuments within the game – which was used by 150 schools in 30 countries – the project facilitated learning and combated the cultural erasure committed in countries such as Afghanistan and Syria.

“We needed an idea that could cross borders, geography and mainly generation codes. We needed an idea to bring two people together. We already had a message and we need to reschedule and re-shape the message,” says Gordilho.

Africa initially had an idea for a printed campaign but UNESCO wanted something wide reaching that would engage young people in an innovative way. Once the team connected with Minecraft and the Minecraft education platform, they knew this project would be revolutionary enough to reach children on their own terms.

Africa trialled what was to become History Blocks with six monuments in a local school but it’s now available open source, featuring hundreds of monuments, to all state schools across the world. “We had Israeli children working with Palestinian children to rebuild a Syrian monument, all in the digital world,” says Vandystadt.

The team are proud of the project but give credit to timing and a great coming together of minds across creative and project management – the combination of which brought the idea to life.

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