BRIDGE participants in a training activity in Amman, Jordan, September 2007. Photo: IDEA
The first BRIDGE Train the Facilitator’s course conducted fully in Arabic – by Arab facilitators – was held in Amman, Jordan from 2 -13 September 2007. 22 participants drawn from electoral management bodies (EMBs) and international organizations in seven Arab countries attended the two-week programme.
BRIDGE (Building Resources in Democracy, Governance and Elections) is a training curriculum on election administration designed to improve the skills, knowledge and confidence of election administrators.
The participants were not only introduced to the BRIDGE training methodology, but were also taught generic training and writing skills, and the ability to adapt subsequent BRIDGE courses that they will facilitate to the needs of their own countries. The training course provided the opportunity for the participants to further develop the BRIDGE programme and implementation methodology for their countries too. Exposure to different experiences from the region helped participants to assess their own situation and identify best practice.
In the last few years International IDEA, along with other BRIDGE partners, has started to focus on how to tackle electoral reform issues in the Arab world. To this end, the main objective of this training course was to build a core team of Arab facilitators with the ability to become involved in developing the electoral processes in the region by providing high-level training courses in elections to EMB staff and others.
The participants expressed their strong satisfaction with the effectiveness of BRIDGE methodology, curriculum and the performance of the facilitators. The group also identified the need for more BRIDGE training to cover other important aspects of elections and electoral processes.
The facilitation team comprised 6 Arab BRIDGE facilitators: Handrin salih, Shuhub Ahmad and Wael Al-Faraj from Iraq, Ossama Kamel from Egypt, and Emad Yousef (International IDEA) and Reem Ersheid from Jordan.
The training was coordinated by three main partners: International IDEA, the UN Development Programme Iraq, and the Iraq High Electoral Commission (IHEC).
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