Working at NDI wasn’t the most natural fit at first for Sushmita Subba Manandhar. When she began working as an office assistant at 26 for NDI in her native Nepal in 1999, she had little interest in the Institute’s programs with political parties or civic organizations.

“I still remember our first director asked me if I was interested in politics,” Manandhar recalled. “I said, ‘No, that is the last thing that I will do in my life.’”

NDI has worked in Nepal since 1994 to strengthen citizen engagement in the political process. The Institute has pursued this goal through civic education programs, opinion polling, assistance to domestic election monitoring organizations and training political party leaders on organization and leadership skills.

With women becoming increasingly prominent in North African politics, NDI brought together more than 60 women from across the region who are both established and emerging as political and civic leaders to discuss the importance of women's political engagement. The group, from Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia, met in Casablanca, Morocco, March 13–14, a site that was chosen in part because of the record 3,406 new women councilors who were voted into office during last year’s municipal elections.

The National Platform for Women, the culmination of a three-month collaboration and consensus-building effort by political party members, civil society activists and government officials from across Iraq, was launched in Baghdad last month in anticipation of Iraq's March 7 parliamentary elections.

A broad coalition of civil society organizations in Burkina Faso recently developed a report detailing discrimination against women in the West African country for presentation to a U.N. committee considering implementation of the international Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

In Bangladesh, traditional gender roles keep most women from gaining political power. A recent forum, "Celebrating Women's Leadership in Bangladesh," brought together female MPs and other Bangladeshi women with political aspirations to inspire and encourage them to run for office and to work together across party lines to increase women's political participation in the country.

NDI recently published the El Salvador 2009 Benchmark Democracy Survey, which measures citizens’ democratic values and perceptions of democracy in their country. NDI also has administered similar surveys in Nicaragua and Guatemala.