Announcement: IFES Unveils New Strategic Plan

ARLINGTON, VA—The International Foundation for Electoral Systems published its Strategic Plan for the period between 2024 and 2029. The plan focuses on fostering credible elections, digital democracy, inclusive societies, accountable governance, and democratic cultures and will orient the organization’s work for the next five years. 

“As the challenges to democracy evolve, the strategies organizations like IFES deploy to meet them need to evolve as fast or faster,” said IFES President Tony Banbury. “This plan affirms our strategic focus on elections, technology, inclusion, and accountability—and adds a commitment to find new and innovative ways to foster and advance democratic culture wherever we can. We are grateful to our community and our partners for their help in crafting this ambitious agenda, and we’re excited to work together making it a reality.” 

To reflect its new Strategic Plan, IFES is also updating its vision statement: A world where people are free, societies are democratic, and elections are fair. 

The newly released plan builds on the successes of IFES’s 2019-2024 Strategic Plan, which expanded the organization’s core emphasis on best practices in election management to include technology, inclusion, and accountability as strategic focus areas. The new Strategic Plan adds a fifth area, democratic cultures, recognizing the essential role that an actively engaged, informed public plays in a healthy democracy. This area of focus builds on a long history of IFES project work in civic education and public engagement.  

The new Strategic Plan also identifies democratic resilience as a cross-cutting focus area. IFES recently launched its Democratic Resilience Lab, a collaborative hub for research and innovation, with an event in Prague.  

IFES’s Board of Directors approved the Strategic Plan at their September meeting. The plan debuted publicly in October and is effective immediately.