Portfolio 1 Subheading
Political Governance
Many African countries embraced the third wave of democracy from the 1990s and early 2000s. However, the democratic experience today is a mixed bag in which consolidations are interspersed with reversals and retreats. One of the key concerns about liberal democracy is its failure to bring about inclusive development. While there are many reasons for this state of play, the weakness of the political parties in terms of their roles in recruiting right candidates for elective positions and playing significant roles in making inputs to policy making is fundamental. Our intervention under this cluster will include building the capacity of political parties in making inputs to policy making and following up on elective officers towards ensuring that they successfully implement their agreed policy targets. While our capacity training programme will take cognizant of local peculiarities, we shall be drawing examples from old political parties in established democracies. The mode of engagement will include organising retreats for top party members across the continent. This will be done on a quarterly basis. Apart from the quarterly retreats, we shall also be organising visits to political party headquarters across the world, where representatives from Africa will be meeting their counterparts in other parts of the world.
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Measuring Quality
Another aspect of our intervention and engagement under this cluster is establishing some metrics for measuring quality of governance on the continent. We will be carrying out studies on how quality of governance affects political institutions and their deliverables. Comparative studies on political institutions in different parts of the world will be carried out. The sole objective will be to improve governance institutions on the Africa.
Conducting polls on elections and performance of public officers is very rare in Africa. We will also be carrying out the exercise in partnership with universities around the world.
Research
As a research based think tank, we will be organising academic conferences on political parties on a bi-annual basis where new theories and practices on political parties will be discussed with the aim of further assisting in building capacity of political parties and associated institutions in Africa.
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Possible Funding
Possible funding institutions include: MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, MO Ibrahim Foundation, SIDA, IDEAS. Participants will also be paying for some of the programmes
GoFundme Campaign