Mathias Hounkpe

Biography

Mathias Hounkpe, a citizen of the Republic of Benin, is the country representative of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) in Gabon since November 2024. Previously he served as IFES country representative in Mali from January 2022 to October 2024 and led the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA) Political Governance and Democratic Consolidation programme for eight years. 

Hounkpe has more than two decades of experience promoting elections and good governance in West Africa, including work on electoral processes as a programme implementer, researcher, observer, thought leader, and educator. He served as an IFES consultant in Benin in the early 2000s and led IFES programming in Chad in the early 2010s. As an ECOWAS elections expert in Mali in 2013, he assisted Malian election management bodies in the technical organisation of the presidential election that year. 

Since 2015, he has lectured on elections and power sharing, good governance, anti-constitutional change of power, and other topics at the Mali-based West Africa Peacekeeping Training School. He is co-author of Election Management Bodies in West Africa: A Comparative Study of the Contribution of Electoral Commissions to the Strengthening of Democracy (2011). Hounkpe holds a master of philosophy degree in political science from Yale University, where he concentrated on accountability mechanism design in new democracies, and a doctorate in mathematical physics from the University of Abomey-Calavi in Benin.