After the South African election in 1994, its focus was on ensuing the establishment of democratic institutions in the country, political transparency and good governance.
[2] It second aim was to find a non-racial and democratic alternatives to current system of apartheid in South Africa.
[2] As political change occurred in South African society, so IDASA adapted its mission and focus since its foundation.
Later in 1986, Slabbert and Breyten Breytenbach met on Gorée Island of Dakar in Senegal and decided that the city should be the location of the conference.
[5]: 73 President PW Botha was furious at IDASA and its delegates and proposed to confiscate their passports and proposed a law which reached a draft bill stage to ban the organization and others but after IDASA pressurized the foreign diplomats in South Africa, that pressure forced the government to revise the bill and it was never banned.
[6]: 23 The five day conference would reach consensus on a need for both sides to maintain a cessation of hostilities, end conscription and the future merging of the SADF, MK, other liberation armies and homelands defence forces into a new non-racial, non-political military organization.
[3] In 1994, IDASA was renamed the Institute of Democracy in South Africa to reflect the nature of the country's 1994 election and the transition to a democratic government.
[13] In an effort to promote democracy in other parts of Africa, Idasa would open offices in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zimbabwe and maintained projects in Uganda, Zambia, Angola, Lesotho, Malawi, Tanzania, Mozambique, and Swaziland to bring democratic ideals to those countries.
[15] After the Great Recession, the funding donations from around the world that sustained IDASA's budgets and programs began to dry up or were severely cut especially to countries now seen as being democratically stable.
[16] IDASA had also expanded into Africa by re-granting funds to worthy organisations but this was complex and due to budgeting issues good staff were lost.
[16] Society's funding of political parties did not seem to be a problem though and the organization would close on 26 March 2013 after a press announcement by Paul Graham, the executive director of The Institute for Democracy in Africa.
[16][17] Some critics from the left have argued that IDASA, with funding from the United States Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy, "pushed an essentially Neo-liberal agenda" focussing on limited forms of representative democracy in which economic questions were not subject to democratic control.