The International Republican Institute (IRI) has been able to get politicians from both the government and opposition to work together to address a series of mechanisms aimed at strengthening Guyana’s electoral infrastructure.
The report of the Program Advisory Committee (PAC), comprising of politicians from the government and the opposition along with civil society members, will be presented sometime after November 15.
The PAC was birthed from more than six months of initial stakeholder consultations between May and October 2021. The PAC was established to demonstrate transparency, foster inclusion and ensure that program activities are driven by national stakeholders. From a sustainability perspective, the PAC offers an opportunity to build the habit among actors and stakeholders of listening to each other’s perspectives on electoral reform as a foundation for national action.
The PAC is made of 13 members with Minister of Culture, Youth and Sport Charles Ramson Jr, Minister of Public Service Sonia Parag and Minister within the Office of the Prime Minister Kwame McCoy representing the government. The opposition is represented by Gary Best, David Patterson and Lenox Shuman. The Amerindian Peoples Association, Organization of Indigenous Peoples and National Toshaos’ Council represent Guyana’s first people.
The Guyana Council of Organizations for Persons with Disabilities, the Private Sector, youth, Women and Gender Equality Commission and LGBTQ+ are also on the PAC.
The PAC was launched on June 2, 2022, and has met five (5) times from July 19, 2022, to September 13, 2022.
At a meeting yesterday, the work of the PAC was presented. The PAC is tasked with reviewing and offering feedback on key recommendations and reports on electoral reform arising from IRI’s program activities; consolidating stakeholder recommendations arising at quarterly multi-stakeholder meetings and during program activities, and compiling a final summary of recommendations on strengthening electoral processes and inform the program multi-stakeholder group.
IRI’s Local Program Manager Sara Bharrat, at yesterday’s MSG meeting, said that the IRI received targeted funding back in April of last year from the United States Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor to provide support to Guyanese stakeholders and leaders to advance their own priorities on strengthening elections in Guyana. She said that the IRI has met with many politicians and civil society members.
She said that the focus area of the program is to provide elections expertise to Guyanese leaders and stakeholders to use and support knowledge and dialogue spaces.
“So earlier, we facilitated some knowledge building, capacity building training called election boot camp 2022 and also we’ve been working with various civil society and other partners and collaborators to facilitate round table discussions on priorities for strengthening electoral processes in Guyana,” she noted.
She said that the programme was scheduled to end in September but has since been extended to November to allow for the compilation of the data.
“…the clear output is in the summary report that contains Guyanese priorities and recommendations for strengthening the electoral processes. The second thing that was part of this process and of course contained in this final report, is we’re going to attempt to categorize the various interests in strengthening electoral processes. So we’ll do this for example by categorizing it by the type of reform, so that could be certain legal type reforms and then we’ll try to map it generally along a timeline.
“…the second thing that we’re also going to do together is we are going to identify joint actions we can collaborate on taking. We have to continue to have these discussion spaces, but I suspect that perhaps one of those joint actions may be a low-hanging fruit in the suite of electoral changes we would like to see,” Bharrat told the gathering of leaders and civil society members.
The final summary report will be ready by November 15 and will be released to the public at some point after that. Those recommendations in the report will also be forwarded to government and the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) for necessary action.
