Dr. Amer Bani Amer is the founder and General Director of Al-Hayat Center for Civil Society Development-RASED, established in 2006. He is also a subject matter expert and trainer on election monitoring, parliament monitoring, and local governance.
Dr. Amer has successfully led the well-known Hayat program, RASED – Accountability, Governance, and Participation. During the 2010, 2013 and 2016 Jordanian Parliamentary Elections, he led the RASED team to conduct the first of its kind process within the region to verify the voters list, using 'voters-to-lists' and 'lists-to-voters' techniques. During the 2013 parliamentary elections he also led the team to conduct parallel vote tabulation (PVT) for the first time in Jordan and the region, with remarkable success. This was repeated in 2016.
In 2014, within RASED program, he led the process of monitoring the performance of the 17th Jordanian Parliament and guided the RASED team in developing scorecards for each MP, another first in the region. The scorecard methodology included 14 qualitative and quantitative indicators, ranking MP performance from best to worst. He currently continues to lead this program which is becoming increasingly popular amongst the grass-roots.
Additionally, and since 2008, Dr. Amer has led projects on strengthening the capacity of women and female leaders, and youth, and on enhancing their participation in Jordanian political life.
Dr. Amer also leads Al Hayat’s projects on Local Governance and Decentralization in Jordan. He has provided continuous analysis of draft laws produced by the Jordanian government for local council law and municipal law. He contributed successfully to government responsiveness to various recommendations produced by the analyses, most noteworthy of which is the change of the local councils by-law to local councils law.
Since 2009, Dr. Amer has contributed to building the capacity of various CSOs, domestic observer groups, and Parliament Monitoring Organizations (PMOs) in different countries including, but not limited to, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Algeria and Morocco and working with NDI, Carter Center, Chemonics International, OECD, EU and other local CSOs. He also participated in many monitoring missions to countries like South Sudan and Egypt.
Dr. Amer has a PhD in Participation in the Sustainable Development Process in Jordan obtained from the Institute for Environment and Development, UKM, Malaysia. He holds a Master of Science in Urban Planning and Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from the Jordan University for Science and Technology.