NDI’s Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) resident director Dany K. Ayida brings over 20 years of experience designing, implementing, evaluating, and providing technical assistance on democracy, governance, and development programs—with a geographic expertise in Central and West Africa. From June 2011 to December 2015, he served as NDI’s resident program director in Burkina Faso, where he oversaw and contributed to the design and implementation of political party development, citizen participation, women’s political participation, and election programs.

Mr. Ayida’s political party programming experience spans over 10 years. In addition to his recent post in Burkina Faso; he has assisted six political parties in conducting strategic planning sessions in Conakry, Guinea, where he also trained NDI staff on political party program evaluation in June 2014. Later that year, he led leadership and communication capacity-building sessions for political parties’ youth leagues in Bamako, Mali. A decade earlier, he trained political party candidates to municipal and legislative elections in Burkina Faso as an NDI senior program officer. After completing a democracy fellowship with the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, D.C., from March to August 2006, Mr. Ayida returned to NDI in early 2007 as a consultant and, for two months, trained political parties’ poll watchers in Nouakchott, Mauritania.

Over the past eight years, Mr. Ayida assisted several democracy and governance programs in the DRC. With the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, he led citizen participation, advocacy, and communication capacity-building workshops for civil society and provincial authorities in Kinshasa, South Kivu, and Kasai Oriental. As a World Bank team leader from April to June 2009, he assessed the administrative structures of the Bandundu, Katanga, and South Kivu provinces and developed a blueprint for DRC’s decentralization framework, vision, and laws. These select experiences familiarized Mr. Ayida with DRC’s national and local contexts and political actors.

Before coming back to work with NDI as a Burkina Faso program director in June 2011, Mr. Ayida gained senior management experience with Africa Label Group, an international development consulting firm, as general manager and a governance and management expert from 2007 to 2011.

Mr. Ayida’s wide-ranging experience has also included developing and implementing civic education and election monitoring programs as the national coordinator for the Centre Afrika Obota in Togo from 1995 to 1999 as well as managing a team of 14 Togolese journalists as Le Temps’ editor from 1999 to 2003. He earned a master’s degree in International Public Law from the University of Lomé, Togo in 1997 and a certificate in Journalism and Communication from Institute for the Advancement of Journalism at Wits University, South Africa in 1999.