The Goree Institute operates in peace building, development and the promotion of arts and culture in Africa.
It was established on June 25, 1992, in the wake of the historic meeting in Dakar, July 1987, between the exile leadership of the African National Congress (ANC) and a significant group of influential civil society representatives and researchers from South Africa — an encounter considered to have opened the way to a negotiated settlement of the South African conflict.
The constitutional and legal environment within which the Institute has since then operated was made possible by the formal statute granted by the state of Senegal in 1991, as an expression of its commitment to allow Goree Institute to work in the challenging but free-minded "democratic space" of an off-shore Pan-African Public Interest Organisation.
Alongside its own activities of research, training and facilitation, this Centre for Democracy, Development and Culture, has set up a section exclusively tasked with the responsibility of hosting summits, researches and artists that in their work contribute to the general ideas of Goree Institute. This section, The Teral, provides conferences and sabbatical facilities on Gorée Island.
The Executive Director is Breyten Breytenbach.