Overview

Democracy Works Foundation (DWF) is a southern African non-profit company focused on democracy development in the region. With headquarters in South Africa, DWF works through its country offices to provide tools to develop and build resilient democracies. DWF also has offices in Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Zambia, and eSwatini. As an independent foundation, we build and promote inclusive, equitable and sustainable consensus democracies for development. We do so by providing tools, platforms and content to strengthen democrats, democratic culture and democracy institutions. DWF opened its doors in 2014 in response to the weakening of public institutions, corruption and declining public participation in South Africa as well as concerns about democratic and development progress in post-liberation Southern Africa. DWF works on the supply and demand side of democracy. We operate across several programmatic areas: • Monitoring: we collect data, do research and provide analysis on the state of democracies. • Institutions: we support the capacity of democracy institutions to fulfill their mandates. • Citizens and leaders: we train future democrats to drive change. • Climate and democracy: we strengthen the capacity of communities and democracy institutions to prioritise climate change initiatives. • Culture: we provide platforms for democratic engagement to cultivate new ideas for democracy. Additionally, the Foundation provides advisory services on good governance and social impact and functions as a fiscal host and fund manager. We believe that democracy is always a work in progress. It is often challenged and never complete. DWF is uniquely placed to continuously invest in and nurture resilient democracy and development.