AfricaIs aCountry

The Afrobarometer

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

The Afrobarometer

By
Liz Timbs

Inaugurating our series on digital African projects. We'll document projects working to make more resources about Africa’s past and present available online.

Jubilant crowds listening to the speech of President Nelson Mandela. 10/May/1994. UN photo credit Sattleberger.

A few weeks ago, at the North Eastern Workshop on Southern Africa in Burlington, Vermont, I got a chance to participate in a roundtable on Digital Southern African Studies with Africa Is a Country’s Sean Jacobs.  Sean asked me if I would be interested in starting a weekly series on digital African projects and I (obviously!) accepted.  So, every week, I’ll be discussing a digital project on an African topic, some based on the continent, some based in the United States, some based in the UK; basically, a lot of really cool projects from all around the world that are working to make more resources about Africa’s past and present available for our use! First up is the Afrobarometer.

The Afrobarometer is a great resource for survey data from 35 African countries.  This project has conducted five rounds of surveys since 1999, producing revealing findings about public opinion on issues of key interest to scholars and the general public alike.  Run by a consortium of continent-based partners, including the Center for Democratic Development (Ghana), Institute for Empirical Research in Political Economy (Benin), Institute for Development Studies at the University of Nairobi (Kenya), and the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (South Africa), this project aims to conduct regular assessments of social, political and economic opinions in such a way that public attitudes can be tracked over time and provided to policy advocates, decision makers, journalists, and concerned members of the public.  The best part about this site is the Online Data Analysis, which utilizes survey data in the archive to produce digital visualizations that allow for spatial and content analysis through a simple interface.

Follow Afrobarometer on Twitter @afrobarometer for their latest findings and news about the next round of surveys.

  • Feel free to send me suggestions in the comments or via Twitter of sites you want us to cover.

 

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.