Annual Reports

 In 2023, NED marked its 40th anniversary of supporting freedom around the world, reaffirmed its commitment to courageous partners, and rallied our communities in common cause for a better future.

In 2022, citizens of some of the most repressive regimes took to the streets in protest of their governments’ actions, risking arrest, violence, and sometimes death. The courage demonstrated by such individuals is a source of continued inspiration for NED’s work supporting freedom around the world.

2021 saw democracy under siege, but despite the challenges, the demand for democracy remains resilient and robust. As freedom is under intensifying pressure globally, NED is innovating to face emerging complex challenges to democracy, ranging from kleptocracy to digital authoritarianism.

Democracy is a very difficult system to maintain, but it is the only system that can secure human freedom, and there is no higher calling than contributing to its development and defense. That’s the NED’s mission, and it’s more important now than ever before.

The past year, like the entire dispiriting decade that has now ended, was a time of deep concern for the future of democracy. Political rights and civil liberties declined for the 14th consecutive year, according to latest Freedom House survey, and the negative global trends that have accounted for the current democratic recession showed no signs of abating.

In recent years, the NED and other organizations working to advance democracy have been challenged by what is commonly called a democratic recession. The term refers to a global crisis of democracy that has a number of different dimensions: the rising power of authoritarian countries such as China and Russia, the backsliding of many new democracies like Hungary and the Philippines, the closing space for independent civic organizations, and a crisis of pluralism in many long established Western democracies.

For the second consecutive year, NED has funded programs in six strategic areas that help democrats respond to the threat posed by resurgent authoritarianism.

NED’s principal task during the last year was to analyze the new threats to democracy, work with its core institutes and the NED Board to shape a strategic plan of action, and begin to implement that plan by making “strategic” grants supporting programs to press back against the authoritarian resurgence in the hope of giving new momentum to the global fight for democracy.

The year 2015 ended with a series of reports that certainly made gloomy reading for the world’s democrats. Freedom House’s Freedom in the World 2015 survey reported a 10th consecutive year of decline in global freedom; Human Rights Watch’s report on 2015 highlighted a global roll-back of human rights and a “great civil society choke-out;” and the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index concluded that “an increased sense of anxiety and insecurity in the face of diverse perceived risks and threats— economic, political, social and security—is undermining democracy.”

2014 marked another challenging year for freedom and democracy. As measured by Freedom House, nearly twice as many countries suffered declines as registered gains in political rights, civil liberties and other democratic standards.

In 2013, the National Endowment for Democracy celebrated 30 years of supporting freedom around the world.

NED marked the year 2012 with celebrations of three key milestones: the 30th anniversary of President Reagan’s Westminster speech that helped launch the idea of a bipartisan institution to advance democracy abroad; the 10th anniversary of the Fellows program named for President Reagan and former congressman Dante Fascell, who had called for establishment of a NED-like body back in the 1960s; and the 5th anniversary of NED’s Center for International Media Assistance.

While responding to the Arab Spring was a priority for NED in 2011, the organization maintained a robust global grants program, with support going to aid democratic efforts in more than 100 countries.

While democracy regressed in many parts of the world and the curbs on NGOs remain a real threat, 2010 has been a year in which civil society and democracy activist have demonstrated impressive levels of vitality and adaptability, and even made progress against authoritarian forces in forbidding circumstances.

The 2009 report reinforces the axiom that democracy is an incremental process, rarely arriving overnight thought a single dramatic event, but rather developing over time through effective groundwork laid at the grassroots.

The 2008 Annual Report highlights much of the day-to-day work of the many democrats working in every corner of the globe.

The programs in this 2007 report offer only glimpses of well over a thousand inspiring and instructive stories of patience, hard work, creativity, and above all, commitment to the ideals that will determine the long-term democratic development of societies world wide.

During 2006, NED and its grantees responded to resistance with an eye toward regaining the forward momentum for democratic progress.

In 2005, the world’s attention was focused upon democratic advances in the Middle East, as Iraqis and Afghans risked their lives to participate in democratic processes once though unimaginable in their countries. But in every corner of the world there were remarkable individual , their stories virtually unknown, who were also advancing the principles of freedom, democracy, and human rights.