Gabrielle Bardall

Gabrielle Bardall is an academic and an electoral assistance expert with over a decade of experience supporting electoral processes in transitional states. Her professional experience spans the design, management, implementation and evaluation of technical elections assistance programs in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Within the field of elections, she focuses on conflict dynamics, political party development, gender issues and electoral systems. Specializing in sub-Saharan Africa, she served as resident program manager in the Democratic Republic of Congo (routinely between 2005 and 2008) and in Guinea (2008) with the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) and as lead technical advisor on election violence prevention in Burundi (2010, 2015) with IFES and UNDP.

As a gender specialist with UNDP's New York headquarters and country offices and with UN Women, Ms. Bardall has contributed to several publications on enhancing women's political participation and has provided training on gender and elections to electoral administrators from over 50 countries. During the post-revolution elections in Egypt in 2011-2012, she introduced gender monitoring and analysis into The Carter Center's election observation missions (EOM), as the Center's first Gender Expert deployed with an EOM core team. Her actions brought the issue of women's political participation to the forefront of the observation mission's analysis and public recommendations during the Constitutional Assembly elections. A researcher and consultant with various international organizations, she has published on progressive areas of her field, including pioneering research on the gender dimensions of election violence. She is an associated expert with the International Knowledge Network of Women in Politics (iKNOW Politics).

As an Expert-level Facilitator with the Building Resources in Democracy, Governance and Elections professional development program (Bridge Project), she has delivered over a thousand hours of training for election administrators and assistance providers including for the electoral assistance division of the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) and electoral administrators from the Middle East/North Africa, Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Carribbean. Ms. Bardall taught at the European University Institute's Executive Training Seminar Series and is an alumni of the Women's Campaign School at Yale University. She also frequently volunteers with grassroots organizations in Africa to share her experience in program design, fundraising and integrating social media and communication technology in election violence prevention programs.

Before her engagement with democracy-governance work, Ms. Bardall worked on grassroots women's community programs in West Africa and Central America. At home in Québec, Gabrielle is an avid gardener and paddler. She is a doctoral candidate at the Université de Montréal where, motivated by her professional experience, her research explores democratization and electoral violence in sub-Saharan Africa. She holds a BA from McGill University in Montréal and an MA from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris.