Centre Party International Foundation - The European Liberal Forum

The Centre Party International Foundation, CIS, is a Swedish Party-Affiliated Organisation established in 1995 by the Swedish Centre Party. It shares the same core values as the Centre Party, a social-liberal, green party with a strong emphasis on sustainability and decentralisation.

Vision and mission

Through its local partners in Palestine, West Africa, the Balkans, and globally, CIS’ main mission is to empower women and youth as key agents of change to strengthen democratic development and participation.

CIS’ interventions are conceptualised in line with a human rights based approach, seeking to ensure the respect of transparency, accountability, participation and non-discrimination at all levels of its project implementation. All the activities are implemented in close collaboration with political parties and organizations working to strengthen liberal values and local democracy, also outside large population centers.

To fulfil its mission, CIS activities focus on two interdependent areas:

Support for sister parties and affiliated political movements and organizations, with the goal of ensuring well-functioning democratic political parties.
Support for multi-party systems, with the goal of ensuring well-functioning, democratically based multi-party systems.

CIS’ work

In terms of support for sister parties, CIS currently supports liberal sister party Nasa Stranka in Bosnia and Hercegovina and Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in North Macedonia. The aim of the support is institutional and organizational capacity-building. To achieve it, CIS is implementing a three-step program for political party capacity-building.

All of CIS’ interventions have women and youth as target groups.

Two of CIS’ programs have women as a specific target group, namely the Empowering Women in Politics (EWIP) program that is implemented by CIS in Burkina Faso and Togo, and secondly a program with Palestinian civil society organization PWWSD, aiming to enhance Palestinian women’s participation and influence in politics and society.

CIS is working with youth through several programs – one of them being Program for Young Politicians in Africa (PYPA). PYPA is a capacity-building program aimed at young politicians in sixteen African countries where CIS is responsible for implementation of the program in seven countries in West Africa. Additionally CIS is working with liberal youth on a global scale in a Global Youth Movements-project that is implemented in partnership with International Federation of Liberal Youth (IFLRY).