President Joseph Nyuma Boakai has signed the founding charter for Liberia's proposed Peace, Reconciliation and Memorial Museum, giving the long-discussed project its first formal governing framework.

The President signed the document on Friday, November 13. Mamaka Bility, Minister of State without Portfolio and chair of the National Steering Committee, and Aliou Mamadou Dia, the United Nations Development Programme's resident representative in Liberia and the committee's co-chair, signed alongside him.

The charter sets out the museum's mandate, its leadership and how decisions will be taken. It also creates five technical working groups: the national narrative; archives and collections; governance and the legal framework; design and visitor experience; and education and public engagement.

The steering committee holds its first meeting from Monday, November 16 to Wednesday, November 18 at the Executive Pavilion in Monrovia. President Boakai is expected to preside over the opening session.

Delegations from Rwanda and South Africa were expected to arrive between November 14 and 15 to share their experience in preserving history, building museums and memorialising conflict. The exchange follows a Liberian study visit in August and September to Rwanda's Gacaca Archives and Campaign Against Genocide Museum, and to South Africa's Apartheid Museum and Freedom Park.

The museum is meant to preserve the history of Liberia's civil wars, honour victims and survivors, and teach future generations what the conflict cost the country. It is expected to collect, verify, preserve and digitise photographs, government records, audiovisual material and survivor testimony.

It sits inside the National Historical Recovery Initiative, launched during the 179th Independence Day celebrations in Buchanan, Grand Bassa County, in July. That initiative aims to recover historical records, including material held abroad, and to put Liberians at the centre of telling their own history.

The United Nations Development Programme puts the death toll from Liberia's 1989–2003 civil wars at about 250,000, with hundreds of thousands more displaced.

What the charter does not settle is just as important. No construction start date, completion timetable, project budget or confirmed site was announced. Those are the questions the steering committee's first meeting will have to answer — and the answers will show whether this becomes a museum Liberians can walk through, or another plan that stays on paper.

What to watch next: the steering committee's opening session on Monday, November 16, and any decision it takes on design, archives, public participation and funding.