On 10 February 2021, a bilateral consultative meeting was held between CECOE’s and NEBE’s representatives who came from different regional offices of the NEBE. The meeting was held under the theme “Elections 2021: Lessons learned”.
In his opening remarks, CECOE’s acting director, Abera Hailemariam, highlighted on major activities of the coalition in the areas of: election observation, voter education and election media monitoring. Following the director’s remark, three different presentations were made by CECOE’s program experts, detailing the various aspects of the coalition’s election programs.
The first presentation addressed CECOE’s voter education project, which reached several millions of Ethiopians through mainstream and social media outlets. Moreover, in the presentation it was indicated that the coalition facilitated and streamlined conditions for its members to deliver voter education to over 2 million Ethiopians. In a bid to capacitate its members, CECOE had also provided a number of trainings to its members on voter education. As a result, this effort has borne fruit and set an example to many CSO coalitions and NGOs that have vested interests in elections.
Covering most part of the presentation, the second presenter elucidated over CECOE’s election observation, observation findings and recommendations to NEBE. The majority of the recommendations suggest that NEBE should capitalize on its strong sides, and remedy gaps that are worth rectifying.
This consultative meeting is the first of four other planned consultative meetings with key stakeholders. In the coming few weeks, CECOE will hold similar consultative meetings with its partners, political parties and media representatives and member organizations.
