Four Tunisians -- Yassine Brahim, Rafik Halouani, Wafa Makhlouf and Sayida Ounissi -- will receive the National Democratic Institute’s (NDI) 2015 Democracy Award at a dinner on Tuesday, November 10. These courageous Tunisian leaders represent civic groups and political parties that embody the spirit of the National Dialogue acknowledged today in the award of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Over the last several decades, Mauritania, a large desert nation on Africa’s west coast, has experienced frequent coups d’état and political deadlock.

Mauritania’s current president, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, ousted the country’s first democratically elected president in 2008 and has won subsequent presidential elections since 2009. The 2013 parliamentary elections and the 2014 presidential election did little to heal the country’s long-simmering political tensions, as parties failed to agree on conditions necessary for the successful conduct of elections.

Since 2006, NDI’s Rinor Beka, senior program manager, of Kosovo has been at the center of his country’s democratic transition.  

Together with his NDI colleagues, Beka has built bridges between different players in Kosovo’s political arena, including members of parliament, political parties and citizen groups, to ensure that their priorities “focus on people” and continue to lay the foundations of democracy.

Historically, women in Pakistan have been involved in election campaigns, but very few have taken part in their party’s policy making process. That is changing through a Political Party Development Program (PPDP), that over the last four years has included 16,609 grassroots party members, of which 44 percent have been women.

Despite the possibility of spillover violence from Syria, a vacancy in the presidency and postponed parliamentary elections, young Lebanese party activists are eager to find ways to enter politics.

Forty of them, representing five political parties, gathered outside Beirut last month for a campaign school for future candidates and campaign teams  to learn how to build outreach strategies and create messages that address voter interests.

Grassroots members of political parties in Pakistan have historically been disconnected from party leaders who are typically the ones who decide the parties’ policy positions. In fact, rank and file members of most parties have often not met their party leaders, let alone had a chance to discuss policy issues with them.

“The policy development process has always been top down,” said Tahir Bizanjo, a senior leader of the National Party.  “What we are learning now is how to make it the other way around.”

A new blog, written by NDI staff, tells the inspiring stories of citizens and organizations doing the challenging work of building democracy around the world.