Collaboration and continuous impartation of knowledge are important in equipping election stakeholders with relevant skills to fortify the country’s democratic space, Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) deputy chairperson Rodney Kiwa has said.
Kiwa was part of 20 participants who attended the Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN) organised programme dubbed Building Resources in Democracy, Governance, and Elections (BRIDGE), which ended on Wednesday.
The 10-day event held in Harare brought together a diverse group of stakeholders including Chapter 12 institutions such as ZEC, and other civil society organisations.
“It (BRIDGE training) is going to be very useful because we at ZEC and indeed as we cooperate with other civil society organisations like ZESN and chapter 12 institutions, will be able to help our people understand how to come out with programs (to enhance electoral processes), how to roll them out and share them,” said Kiwa.
“Most of the time we have programs but if we are not able to share it with the next person, to understand, appreciate and be able to put it to use then we are not achieving much. So, all that was packaged during the training and we really benefited from that.”
Jointly funded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), among other partners, the training served as a crucial platform for reviewing how Zimbabwe conducted its August 2023 general elections, with stakeholders gaining some in-depth knowledge of the BRIDGE programme.
“It's a curriculum, which is a very comprehensive course in terms of electoral processes but also giving facilitation skills, electoral knowledge and we covered a wide range of pertinent issues in Zimbabwe like the types of voter registers, the political party regulation campaign finances regulation,” executive director and accrediting BRIDGE facilitator Rindai Chipfunde-Vava.
“We also looked at other case studies from other countries as we had foreign facilitators so they were giving us their life experiences so it was a rich networking and exchanging of electoral experiences and information as well as application of the concepts learnt.”
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Since its inception in 2002, BRIDGE has made a global impact, training over 19 000 facilitators worldwide and is renowned for its modular professional development approach, with a laser focus on upholding electoral integrity.
