Fabio Bargiacchi is the ideator and the founder of ECES. He is a member of ECES’ Management Board and till today he is serving as the Executive Director.
Over this period in this position he, together with his colleagues and collaborators, have led ECES to become one of the four most important electoral assistance providers for implementing projects funded by the EU and EU Member States. ECES is nowadays recognised as one of the most important electoral assistance actors globally, along with UNDP, IDEA, OSCE-ODHIR, IFES, NDI, IRI. EISA etc.
As Founder-Executive Director, he led ECES to obtain the TRACE and ISO 9001 certifications for its financial and quality management standards having implemented activities in over 50 countries mostly, but not only limited to Africa and the Middle East. He has played and maintains a strategic role in resource mobilisation and supervision of all activities of his teams at HQ and in the field which he managed to build as a truly international, multicultural and multilgual one. With individuals from at least 60 different countries who can work in at least 25 languages and dialects, Fabio managed to build ECES and its personnel as diverse as the electoral stakeholders ECES cooperates with worldwide.
Fabio also led ECES to obtain an important number of copyrighted certificates where he started to copyright the concept of ECES per se as not for profit, independent, non partisan foundation established with the main purpose of facilitating the electoral cooperation between the EU, EU Member States and their partner countries when it comes to electoral assistance projects.
He continued with ECES' specific project approach called the “European Response to Electoral Cycle Support, EURECS” which in turn is implemented using 18 others copyrights among ICTs applications, tools and methodologies. In total, Fabio has authored and managed for ECES to obtained 20 copyrights which are a testimony to the leading-edge work of ECES across the globe, and his commitment to continuous improvement to further contribute to democratic and electoral processes worldwide. The list of copyright is as follows:
- Concept of the European Centre for Electoral Support,
- European Response to Electoral Cycle EURECS,
- Leadership and Conflict Management Skills for Electoral Stakeholders (LEAD),
- Electoral Political Economy Analyses (EPEA) Methodology,
- Preventing election-related conflict and potential violence (PEV),
- Standard Operating Procedures (SOP),
- Communication and Visibility (C&V) Guidelines,
- Electoral Security Threat Assessment (ESTA),
- Leadership and Quality Management Skills for Electoral Administrators (LEAD-Q),
- Innov-Elections distance learning,
- Electoral Translator application,
- Roster Database for Electoral Assistance Experts,
- Peace Mediation for Electoral Processes methodology,
- Media Monitoring and Early Warning to tackle hate speech, mitigate conflict and gender-based violence strategy,
- Strategic Planning for Electoral Management Bodies,
- Polling Station Allocation System (GIS) application,
- Poll Workers Management System (PWMS) application,
- Electoral Results Aggregator (for EMBs and CSOs) application,
- Unified Social Media Monitoring and Early Warning System application
- Voter List Digitalisation System application.
Fabio’s work in the elections field dates back to the early 1990s. From 1997 onwards, he has continuously extended his expertise in the field of electoral support at the international level. In the period 1997-2004 he held a variety of posts in the field of electoral assistance and observation with the EU, the UN and the OSCE. He operated for long term assignments in countries such as Central African Republic, Zimbabwe, West Bank and Gaza, Zambia, Kenya, Nigeria, Haiti, Tanzania, Democratic Republic of Congo Suriname and Indonesia where he worked as Senior Election Operations Expert, Training/Reporting Advisor and Coordinator of EU Election Observers, among other senior positions.
Fabio also developed a deep knowledge in project cycle management, particularly in the Democratic Governance field as explicitly shown by his experience working for the European Commission at the Delegation of the EU in Maputo (Mozambique) from 2001 to 2003 and at the EU Headquarters (European Commission, EuropeAid) in Brussels between 2004 and 2006 as Election Specialist. From January 2007 to December 2010, Fabio served as Coordinator of the "Joint EC UNDP Task Force On Electoral Assistance" (JTF) and Senior Electoral Assistance Advisor at the UN/UNDP Brussels Office. During this period, he contributed to the establishment of the same Joint Task Force and oversaw its activities for the identification, formulation and support for the implementation of all the EC-UNDP electoral assistance projects.
From October 2004 to December 2006, he worked as Election Specialist at the Directorate for Operations Quality Support of the EuropeAid and he was the coordinator and main author of the "EU Methodological Guide on Electoral Assistance". Fabio was, thus, involved in more than 70 UNDP projects amounting up to a sum of more than 600 million EURO from October 2004 till December 2010. Bargiacchi was also at the forefront of the conception and delivery of all the Joint EC UNDP IDEA effective electoral assistance, face-to-face and distance e-learning training from September 2005 till February 2011. From January 2011 to February 2012, he worked as Chief Technical Advisor for the EU funded "Project in Support of the Electoral cycles for the five Portuguese Speaking Countries in Africa (Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, Sao Tome and Principe) and Timor Leste", implemented by the UNDP. This was the first ever trans-national electoral assistance project that focused exclusively on capacity development.
Considering his experiences with OSCE, UN/UNDP, EU and ECES, Fabio has dealt with electoral and democratisation processes in over 60 different countries and worked on the identification, formulation, implementation or evaluation of more than 100 electoral assistance projects since 1997.
From 2014 until 2019 Fabio was a Member of the Board of the European Partnership for Democracy (EPD), serving as Vice President and Acting President from 2015 to 2017 while at present he brought ECES to be part of the European Peacebuilding Liaison Office network, the biggest and leading civil society European platform of 50 independent organisations and think tanks from 17 European countries committed to peacebuilding and the prevention of conflict.
Fabio is a BRIDGE accrediting training-facilitator and the main creator of the training curriculum "Leadership and Conflict Management Skills for Electoral Stakeholders, LEAD" conceived together with the Centre for Creative Leadership. He is a graduate of Political Science following studies at the University of Florence (Cesare Alfieri) and at the "Universite Libre de Bruxelles" and holds a Master of Arts on Society, Science and Technology after studies at University of Roskilde (Denmark) and University of Oslo (Norway). In the last 15 years, he has authored, coordinated, co-authored and contributed to a series of election-related publications and papers:
- Strategic Planning for Electoral Management Bodies using Quality Management Principles (2022)
- Media monitoring Hate Speech and Gender Based violence (2022)
- SDG16: An enabler for accelerated implementation of the 2030 Agenda amid COVID-19 for the Think 20 in the context of the G 20 in Italy of Octobre 2021
- Challenges and opportunities for the implementation of e-voting in Nigeria: lessons from international experiences (2021)
- Delivering Electoral and Democracy Support during the COVID 19 period. ECES preparedness and response: Innov-Elections (2020)
- ECES Standard Operating Procedures for the Implementation of the European Response to Electoral Cycle Support (2019)
- ECES Communication and Visibility Guidelines (2019)
- “The potential of EU Funded electoral assistance to support the prevention of election related conflict and violence: Lessons from the Southern African Region”
- EURECS - A European Response to Electoral Cycle Support (2016)
- Using International Standards. Council of Europe Handbook for Domestic Election Observers (2013)
- Missing a Trick? Building Bridges between EU Mediation and EU Electoral Support in Conflict-affected Countries - Expert Seminar Report, (2012)
- Essential Consideration of Electronic Voting published by International IDEA (2011)
- ISPI Working Paper on the Electoral Cycle Approach: Effectiveness and Sustainability of Electoral Assistance (2011)
- EU and Peace building, Policy and Legal Aspects: EU Electoral Support: (2010)
- EC-UNDP Operational Paper on Procurement Aspects of Introducing ICTs in Electoral Processes: the specific case of biometric voter registration (2010)
- EC-UNDP Operational Guidelines. Implementation of Electoral Assistance Programmes and Projects (2006 and 2008)
- ACE Focus on Effective Electoral Assistance (2007)
- UNDP Electoral Assistance Implementation Guide (2007)
- EC Methodological Guide on Electoral Assistance (2006)
Languages: Italian, French, English, Portuguese and Spanish.
