Moses Mkumpha was teaching high school biology in Malawi’s capital of Lilongwe when he spotted an announcement in the newspaper. The Ministry of Tourism, Wildlife and Culture’s antiquities department was looking for a conservator. To this young Malawian, two years out of college and eager to make a difference, it sounded like an ideal job. “It combined science and history,” he says, and spoke to “the love of my heritage, to be proud of who I am and my background.”

Malawi is a sliver of a country, nestled between Zambia to the west, Tanzania to the north and Mozambique to the east and south. The son of a postmaster, Mkumpha, along with his six siblings, had moved every few years, giving him a firsthand sense of the richness and diversity of Malawi’s patrimony.

When he accepted the post of conservation officer in 2010, he discovered it was also in grave danger. For almost 20 years, the country had had no trained conservator overseeing preservation, conservation and restoration. Stepping into this vacuum, Mkumpha suddenly found himself responsible for a mind-boggling range of objects and sites — baskets, drums, wood carvings, masks, dinosaur bones, ceramics, Iron Age tools, 19th-century forts used during the slave trade and the richest concentration of rock art in Central Africa.

“I didn’t know where to start,” he says. The department had no inventory of its holdings. There was virtually no funding for the restoration of buildings. And some of the country’s most important cultural and tourist destinations — granite hills painted with images of animals centuries ago — were being damaged. Meanwhile, Mkumpha realized he lacked the necessary training to make confident, sound decisions. That said, he had the necessary foundation in chemistry and biology — not to mention the perseverance — to learn.

A 31-year-old man with a warm smile and quiet demeanor, Mkumpha is now in the final stretch of a nine-month program put together by the Conservation Center of New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and funded by the Leon Levy Foundation. Each year since 2009, the foundation has invited one conservator from a country that, as Conservation Center Chairman Michele Marincola explains, “has an emerging sense of cultural patrimony but not the infrastructure to support education at a high level.”