Sustainable Development Goal 16 (SDG16) is a hugely significant commitment because it makes an explicit connection between global development and the importance of peace, justice and good governance. Democratic institutions have an important role to play in delivering the Global Goals everywhere.
Building the capability of oversight institutions such as parliamentary committees, an Office of the Auditor General, and civil society organisations is vital.
With support from UK Aid through the Standing Together for Democracy Consortium, WFD and the Sierra Leone Union on Disability Issues (SLUDI) partnered up to reach the PWDs community across Sierra Leone.
WFD has continued to mobilise and train Corps members to reach out to youths, women and PWDs with voter education messages and support the participation of marginalised groups in the electoral process.
The year saw us conduct more than 600 activities, reaching over 6,000 participants and producing almost 100 products ranging from research on the cost of politics we commissioned to a strategic plan for the National Assembly of Pakistan that we supported.
Forming the southern tip of the Himalayas, Kachin state in far-northern Myanmar is home to some of the richest mines in the world. Kachin’s abundant natural resources — gold, amber, jade, copper, and rubies — have fuelled a long-running civil war and fighting continues to afflict communities in resource-rich mining areas.
In April 2019, WFD launched a new and innovative activity and outcome monitoring system called the Evidence and Impact Hub (EIH). WFD has certainly not found a magic solution to this problem, but we can report very good uptake and a large amount of usable data in our 8th month after launching it.
International Human Rights Day on Tuesday 10 December is an occasion to underline that human rights, and the interdependence of human rights and the rule of law, are core components of democracy as a concept and as a practice.
On 14th November 2019, the young people of East Africa elected Ashura Michael, a deaf youth activist from Kenya, as one of four Speakers of their Youth Parliament.
In North Macedonia, WFD is working with persons with disabilities (PWDs), a marginalised and underrepresented group in society, to ensure their needs are at the top of the policy agenda.
WFD is trying to be a different kind of learning organisation, and one of the first steps towards that has been the addition of pre-set learning questions to our programmatic quarterly reports.
WFD supported the 2019 YouLead summit – the largest youth leadership gathering in East Africa – which seeks to enable young people to be more meaningfully involved in the implementation and tracking of the region’s sustainable development goals.