IFES President Travels to Asia
The International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) President and CEO Anthony Banbury will visit country offices and donor capitals in Asia from Oct. 3 to Nov. 2. He will start in Timor-Leste from Oct. 5 to 7. During his visit, he will meet with President José Ramos-Horta to discuss the advancement of inclusion in the Timor-Leste elections.
Between Oct. 7-10, Banbury will attend the 2022 Global Network on Electoral Justice (GNEJ) Conference in Indonesia and give remarks at the opening plenary. He will be accompanied by IFES Indonesia Country Director Admira Salim.
Banbury will travel Oct. 11-15 to Papua New Guinea to visit the IFES country office in Port Moresby, led by Country Director Paul Rowland. They will be joined by IFES Regional Director Melika Atic. The group will meet with the Election Commission to discuss the June 2022 election. IFES has been a committed stakeholder in Papua New Guinea and the Autonomous Region of Bougainville since 2001.
Banbury will then travel to Honiara, Solomon Islands, followed by Suva, Fiji. He will meet with elections commissions in each place, as well as IFES’s civil society partners. Current IFES programming covers 12 Pacific Islands countries: the Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu.
Banbury will then travel to Canberra, Australia, from Oct. 23 to 25 to consult with IFES’s Australian partners. Banbury will be in Japan from Oct. 26 to 29 for consultations on the state of democracy across the region.
During the final part of this trip from Oct. 30 to Nov. 1, Banbury will join the Electoral Commission of India in New Delhi, India, for their convening of the Democracy Summit’s Electoral Integrity Cohort in New Delhi, India. He will be joined by Silja Paasilinna, IFES Country Director for Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
