The Afrobarometre collects and disseminates information concerning the African opinion on democracy, governance, market reforms, civil society and the quality of life. The surveys in Round 1 were conducted between 1999 and 2001. At the time, the project covered seven (7) Southern African countries (Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe), three (3) West African countries (Ghana, Nigeria and Mali) and two (2) Eastern African countries (Uganda and Tanzania). The surveys from Round 2 ended in November 2003 with the extension of four (4) new countries: Kenya, Senegal, Cap Verde, and Mozambique. Those from Round 4 will take place in 2008 with around 20 countries.
Survey Topics
- Democracy :
Popular understanding of, support for, and satisfaction with democracy, as well as any desire to return to, or experiment with, authoritarian alternatives.
- Governance :
The demand for, and satisfaction with, effective, accountable and clean government; judgments of overall governance perfomance and social service delivery.
- Livelihoods :
How do African families survive? What variety of formal and informal means do they use to gain access to food, shelter, water, health, employment and money?
- Macro-economics and Markets :
Citizen understandings of market principles and market reforms and their assessments of economic conditions and government performance at economic management.
- Social Capital :
Whom do people trust? To what extent do they rely on informal networks and associations? What are their evaluations of the trustworthiness of various institutions?
- Conflict and Crime :
How safe do people feel? What has been their experience with crime and violence?
- Participation :
The extent to which ordinary folks join in development efforts, comply with the laws of the land, vote in elections, contact elected representatives, and engage in protest. The quality of electoral representation.
- National Identity :
How do people see themselves in relation to ethnic and class identities? Does a shared sense of national identity exist?
Methods of collecting data
Although other methods of research were used in the concept of the project, the Afrobarometre is based on personalised interviews to obtain information coming from the individual. The same questionnaire, which had identical questions or rather equivalent ones, were administered to all the referees in each country. The questions, being standardised gave a chance for the answers to become compared between countries.
During the individual interview, the interviewer handles a random interview with the also random person chosen to be interviewed. The interviewer asks a series of questions in the language that the referee speaks. He makes note of the answers (to the questions). The advantages of this method is not only the rate of response of the inquiry but also the referees have the opportunity to clarify their answers. With these responses together, we may make inferences from public opinion.
It must be noted that the Afrobarometre inquiries are based on national samples. Because of this, the aggregated results are representative of the largest groups. At the national level, the size of the Afrobarometre samples are large enough to make inferences on all the citizens of the voting age with a margin of error not exceeding ±2.8 % with a threashold of confidence of 95$ (for a sample size of 1200).
Therefore, it must be noted that the results cannot be generalised for all of Sub-Saharan Africa. It is possible to lead opinion investigations in countries which have taken measures for political liberalisation, where the actual sample of the country does not include authoritarian regimes or where the country is in the midst of civil war. it must be added that in an effort to have the most representative research, give (5) francophone and two (2) lusophone countries are from now on covered.
Website: http://www.afrobarometer.org