Libya’s Big LEAP

A three day BRIDGE workshop – Introduction to Electoral Administration was funded by UNDP Libya through LEAP programme took place in Tripoli from 15th to 17th October. Eighteen staff members of United Nations Electoral Support Team in Libya, National and International, over the three days participants explored topics of the BRIDGE introduction module. The Workshop brought together the UNEST integrated team including electoral officers from UNSMIL, UNDP and UNOPS. The workshop was organized to coincide with the immediate post-electoral period in Libya, allowing participants to reinforce their electoral knowledge. The workshop was a challenging and exciting opportunity to the newly semi-accredited facilitators who recently attended TtF in Cairo/ Egypt.
The three day workshop opened with several activities to re-focus on the “big picture” values, standards and principles of democratic governance and credible electoral assistance.
Days two and three jumped deep into the curriculum focusing on legal framework, electoral management bodies and electoral systems.

The sessions on electoral systems were conducted through a mixture of PowerPoint presentations, Q&A, brainstorming and group work. The relative importance of various electoral principles was discussed in relation to electoral systems, all the main systems were briefly introduced, and the advantages and disadvantages of 3 main systems were then discussed by groups comprising people with differing levels of electoral experience.

” Although I have implemented many workshops and especially the same module (Introduction to Electoral Administration) but this event was unique as I were dealing with different target group of audience, first of all I have to present BRIDGE in English and for the first time, so happy that I broke the language barrier and to be honest I was not sure that I can do it but the support of the facilitators around me, made it happened.” Shuhub Alhashemi

” The benefit of sharing knowledge and experiences on topics such as electoral systems, electoral management bodies and working with electoral stakeholders, was highly valued and a great interest shown in more in depth exchange on particular topics such as voter registration, boundary delimitation, legal framework” Dagmar Mehrtens

“The participants appreciated the workshop and found it useful, while being part of the facilitation team was an eye opener for me in how to be part of the facilitation team” Annan Sori

The workshop was facilitated by the following team:

• Bassam Alyaseri (Lead facilitator)
• Ruth Meyer (workshop facilitator)
• Shuhub Alhashemi (workshop facilitator)
• Alessandra Rossi (workshop facilitator)
• Annan Sori (semi – accredited facilitator)
• Dagmar Mehrtens (semi – accredited facilitator)