The Young Women Leaders Academy (YWLA), a year-long program that aims to inspire and empower young Middle Eastern women to pursue political careers in their home countries, culminated in a two-week retreat in Madison, Wisconsin, last month, where participants met with elected women leaders from across the state and honed their leadership skills and political aspirations.
The participants are now back in their home countries, where they are pursuing a range of options, from starting their own advocacy organizations to running for elective office.
As Iraqis work to create a new government, a group of young people is working to perfect the civic advocacy skills they need to influence how policy is made.
Members of Iraq's National Youth Caucus (NYC) came together recently to discuss their strategies for ongoing advocacy campaigns for improving high school and college education and combating the high rate of youth unemployment.
Togo’s March 2010 presidential election represented a positive step in the country’s democratic development. Violence surrounding flawed presidential elections in 2005 resulted in the deaths of hundreds of citizens, and the displacement of many more. In the run-up to the 2010 presidential poll, the country’s longstanding political and ethnic divides again heightened the potential for electoral violence. But while opposition parties alleged serious irregularities during the vote tabulation process, voting on election day proceeded peacefully.
As Egypt prepared for parliamentary elections last month, Partners in Change (PIC), a coalition of 27 grassroots organizations, conducted an innovative voter education and get-out-the-vote campaign.
"We're working on adding fast interactivity to data-heavy maps. You can see this working on two historical mapping sites we launched with the National Democratic Institute for the 2004 and 2005 elections in Afghanistan. In short, it's now possible to hover over map tiles and see the specific data they contain.
"Disclosing this in Abuja on Wednesday when he received in his office a delegation of the National Democratic Institute, NDI who are on pre-election assessment mission in Nigeria, Nwodo said that the party national leadership was worried about the smear campaign by the campaign organizations, stressed that it was prepared to take all necessary steps to halt the trend before it degenerates into something else.
