ECES is proud to announce that, thanks to the contribution of the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and our new funding partner the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ireland, a new contract in Ethiopia has been signed.
“Election Observation by CSOs: ECEs sub-grant to the Coalition of Ethiopian Civil Organizations for Elections (CECOE)” complements the existing projects implemented by ECES in Ethiopia as part of the EU democratic package in Ethiopia (EURECS Ethiopia and PEV Ethiopia) funded by the European Union and Germany (via the German Development Bank, KFW).
Under ECES project PEV-Ethiopia together with funding from NDI, CECOE had initially committed to deploying 2.000 Observers across Ethiopia in order to cover the 2021 Ethiopian Elections to be held on 21 of June.
With this new project, the number of Observers will be increased to a total of 4100. The new observers will be trained and prepared by ECES and its partners with a series of courses and trainings using ECES’ copyrighted strategies. This new project will be carried out in coordination with NDI and IRI in order to avoid redundancies.
The training will focus on four main components:
- Civic and Voter Education
- Observation of Pre-Election environment and campaign
- Observation of Polling on Election Day
- Observation of Election Results Aggregation and Post-Election Activities
After the signing, Fabio Bargiacchi, our Founder and Executive Director, commented:
“I am very honoured to see ECES being entrusted once again by Denmark and by another EU Member State such as Ireland, with further supporting the upcoming elections in Ethiopia.
So far, alongside the European Union which represents our first funding partner, 6 EU Member States have supported our activities and projects, namely Germany, Italy, Denmark, Austria, Luxembourg and France. Now, I am happy that ECES can count also on Ireland to continue to implement electoral assistance activities that are consistent primarily with European values and EU policies targeting the facilitation of the cooperation on electoral matters between the EU, the EU member states and their partners' countries, in this case: Ethiopia.”