Chris Fomunyoh, Senior associate and regional director for Central Western Africa at NDI is joined by Ambassador Johnnie Carson, a proud member of the Board of Directors of NDI with a 37-year career in the US foreign service focused on Africa. 2020 looks like it’ll be an exciting year for Africa with emerging opportunities for some countries to consolidate their democracies, but what backsliding could undermine recent gains in democratic governance?

What are the challenges of democracy and governance work and how you build inclusion, especially amongst youth? DemWorks is back at the US Institute of Peace to continue the discussion on the role of governance in the prevention of violence and to fight violent extremism. NDI’s Lauren van Metre is once again joined at the US Institute of Peace by activists Emna Jeblaoui (Tunisia), Jacob Bul Bior (South Sudan), Samson Itodo (Nigeria) and Aluel Atem (South Sudan).

In Jordan, youth under the age of thirty comprise more than 70 percent of the population. But the growing youth population has faced limited opportunities to engage in politics, leading to rising apathy and low civic participation among young Jordanians. For any democracy to succeed it must deliver for citizens through accountability, transparency and inclusion of all people in the democratic process.

In the latest episode of DemWorks, NDI’s Lauren van Metre is joined at the US Institute of Peace by global activists Emna Jeblaoui (Tunisia), Jacob Bul Bior (South Sudan), Samson Itodo (Nigeria) and Aluel Atem (South Sudan). They discuss new thinking about mobilizing good governance and the challenge violent extremism poses to democracy

As the electoral calendar has it, a critical mass of francophone African countries holds presidential elections every five years – next time in 2020. The politics of these seven elections provides a good indicator of general democratic trends in French-speaking West and Central Africa. None of the seven countries has previously experienced a peaceful transfer of power from one elected president to the next.

NDI Chairman Madeleine Albright continues to actively support the US Institute of Peace’s Task Force on Extremism in Fragile States, and will participate on January 7 in a USIP, NDI, GW Bush Institute co-hosted event on “A Governance Agenda for Preventing Violence in a Fractured World”.

Wow, another year has passed and the DemWorks blog is now five years old. In 2019, DemWorks had some huge growth spurts, adding Podcast and Video series and reaching upwards of 73,400 unique pageviews – that’s nearly 23 percent increase over last year!

Feeling excluded from formal politics, young Lebanese have united with a new spirit of national identity and support for more responsive governance.

2019 marks my first full year at the helm of the National Democratic Institute. Looking back on a year that marked the 30th anniversary of both the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in China and the fall of the Berlin Wall in Europe, there is much on which to reflect.

As DemWorks first year draws to a close, NDI President Derek Mitchell has one final question for his predecessors, Brian Atwood and Ken Wollack. How, as an American organization, has NDI remained separate from the U.S. government, and how has the issue of democracy support evolved over time?