Political Parties in Africa: Challenges for Sustained Multiparty

International Idea
campaign expenditure, it was not possible to elicit sufficient and accurate information
either because the leaders do not have full knowledge or because they were reluctant
to speak about them.
The work began with pre-testing of the questionnaire in Ghana and Lesotho in
May 2004. Afterwards, a three-day workshop on the methodology to be adopted for
this programme and to discuss in detail the questionnaire on parties’ organizational
structures and functioning was held in Pretoria, South Africa, in July 2004 for
the researchers in Southern Africa. A similar methodology workshop was held in
Ouagadougou later in July 2004 for the West Africa researchers and in April 2005
for the researchers in East Africa.
The database on parties that will be developed as part of this research will be of
help to those who would like to take a closer look at the working of political parties
around the world.
Based on the two questionnaires relating to the country context and the external
regulations and environment, as well as the interviews with party leaders, separate
Country Reports were prepared for several of the countries. As a sequel to the research
phase, national and regional dialogue workshops where held between political parties,
researchers, civil society and international actors to validate the research findings
and discuss agendas for further research, debate and reform. Such regional dialogue
workshops were held in South Africa December 2004, and Mauritius April 2005,
for Southern Africa, in Burkina Faso June 2005, for West Africa, and in Kenya in
December 2005, for East Africa. In addition, national dialogue workshops have been
conducted in Burkina Faso November 2004, Mali November 2005, Ghana February
2005, Nigeria in January 2006 and Senegal January 2005. The dialogues provided
an opportunity for the party leaders to tell others the difficulties and challenges they
face and for the public and intellectuals to tell the party leaders how they view parties
and how they think the problems in the party domain could be tackled.
The information gathered from political parties during the interviews with the
leaders and the discussions at the dialogue workshops are the major source for the
preparation of this report. This report is the second in a series of regional reports
that IDEA will be publishing. When all the regional reports come out, we hope to
arrive at some meaningful conclusions on the state of political parties in different
parts of the world, the problems and challenges they face in the 21st century and the
measures to address them.
Methodology