Tanyel Taysi currently serves as the Country Director for the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) in Bangladesh. Tanyel is a political scientist with 20 years of experience in democracy, rights, and governance, having worked on participatory and responsive sub-national governance, access to justice, civil society engagement, gender, equity, and social inclusion, among others. She has worked in on over 30 countries and has led long-term USAID, US Department of State, UK, EU, and other European donor-funded programming.  Dr. Taysi joins IFES from ABA ROLI, where she provided technical guidance and designed safeguarding-centered theoretical and methodological approaches for research products and programmatic approaches and training materials for women’s empowerment and human rights programming in 20 countries.    Her field postings include Liberia, where she led an INL funded project to bring together security sector and sub-national governance actors with community members and CSOs. She spent time in Afghanistan working on stabilization and governance; in North Africa in Morocco, where she designed the methodological approach and tools for a HICD assessment of a government ministry; and in Tunisia, where she led stabilization, women’s empowerment, and participatory sub-national governance programming on Libya for EU and other European funded programming.