Cote d’Ivoire

Dr. Mathias Hounkpe, a citizen of the Republic of Benin, has been the Head of the Elections and Political Processes (EPP) Department at EISA (Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa) since June 15, 2025. Previously, he was the Country Director of IFES (International Foundation for Electoral Systems) in Gabon from November 30, 2024, to March 31, 2025, and in Mali from January 2022 to October 2024. He was the Manager of the political governance and democratic consolidation program at the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA) from April 2013 to December 2020 after heading OSIWA’s Office in Guinea from July 2010 to March 2013. Dr. Hounkpe has more than two decades of experience promoting elections and good governance in West Africa, including extensive experience with electoral processes as a program implementation manager, researcher, observer, opinion leader, and educator. In the early 2000s, Mr. Hounkpe was an IFES consultant in Benin, and later, in the early 2010s, he led IFES programming in Chad. He traveled to Mali as an ECOWAS election expert in 2013 and assisted Malian election management bodies with the technical organization of that year's presidential election. Since 2015, Dr. Hounkpe has been teaching courses on topics such as elections and power sharing, good governance, and unconstitutional changes of power at the West Africa Peacekeeping Training School, based in Mali. Dr. Hounkpe is also one of the authors of the book Election Management Bodies in West Africa: A Comparative Study of the Contribution of Electoral Commissions to Strengthening Democracy. Dr. Hounkpe holds a Master of Philosophy from Yale University in the United States, where he focused on "the design of accountability mechanisms in new democracies," and a doctorate in mathematical physics from the University of Abomey-Calavi in Benin, where he focused on "scattering theory."