This capacity building academy will take place beginning today to Friday at a local resort in Monrovia. The forum opens between 9am and 10am with remarks from the Liberian Democratic Institute (LDI), WAEON Chairman Mashood Erubami, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), and Gabriel Smith, Chairman of the Elections and Inauguration Committee, House of Representatives.
The West African Election Observers Network (WAEON) is an independent, non-partisan, and non-religious network of citizen election observation/monitoring organizations in West Africa dedicated to the promotion of free, fair, transparent and peaceful election in Africa.
Formed in 2010, WAEON was inaugurated in Abuja on February 21, 2011. Currently, WAEON consists of 11 Citizens’ Election Observation groups located in 11 West African countries namely Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Ghana, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo.
The organization’s mission is to strengthen and support citizen election observer groups for effective participation in electoral and democratic processes in West Africa through support to: non-partisan citizen election observation and monitoring; electoral reform advocacy; and the exchange of best practices.
The objectives of the network are as follows: to promote the adoption and implementation of international and regional norms on elections, democracy and good governance; to strengthen the capacity and independence of member organizations to mount election observation/monitoring projects covering the entire electoral cycle based on the highest ethical standards and best practices, etc.
WAEON is a member of the Global Network of Domestic Election Observers (GNDEM) and subscribes to the Declaration of Global Principles for Non-Partisan Election Observation and Monitoring by Citizen Organizations.
Since its formation WAEON has been involved in a number capacity building efforts to improve the work of citizens’ election observation groups in the West African sub-region. For example, the network has supported the democratic re-construction of Cote d’Ivoire with its focus on the rule of civil society in election violence mitigation and peace. It has also been involved in pre-election capacity building for domestic election observation groups in Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Mali.
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