The project, initiated by UNESCO, is concerned with the access to and preservation of original archive materials relating to the slave trade. Funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD), it is being implemented within the framework of UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme, in collaboration with the International Scientific Committee for UNESCO's Slave Route Project and with the International Council on Archives (ICA).

The Slave Route Project aims at studying and making know the causes and modalities of the slave trade, "the greatest tragedy in the history of mankind in terms of scale and duration" (Jean-Michel Deveau) stressing the interactions that it generated in the Americas, the West Indies and the Indian