 Good morning, and welcome to today's program, which is being hosted by the United States Institute of Peace. My name is Johnny Carson, and I serve as a senior advisor at USIP. For those of you who are joining us for the first time, the United States Institute of Peace is a non-partisan organization created 34 years ago by the United States Congress to do everything possible to prevent, mitigate, and resolve conflict. I am extremely pleased to open today's event, which will focus on Afrobarometer's most recent survey work in 18 African countries. That survey work provides unique insights into what Africans think about the continent's future. Afrobarometer is an extraordinary asset for anyone doing serious work on African issues. It is, in fact, the gold standard for African attitudinal surveys on social, economic, political, and religious issues. It is also a very strong advocate for democracy and good governance issues as well. Afrobarometer's work is scientific, reliable, and timely, and is often the only dependable gauge on which we can know what African citizens are thinking. It is Africa's equivalent to the Pew Research Organization in the United States, and its value cannot be overestimated. USIP is extremely pleased to be collaborating once again with Afrobarometer to provide a platform for sharing its important attitudinal research work. Today's program will feature three distinguished speakers who will be introduced shortly by my colleague, Susan Stegat, the director of the Africa program. But before we begin our program, I would like to take this opportunity to introduce everyone in our audience to our new director for Africa, Dr. Joseph Sani. Dr. Sani, who has just joined USIP, will be serving as the new vice president for USIP's new and expanding Africa Center. Dr. Sani brings to his senior leadership position several decades of peace building and conflict prevention work. He has worked closely with civil society groups, NGOs, security forces, and government officials across Africa in Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso, DRC, and Nigeria. Dr. Sani holds a PhD from George Mason University, and we are extremely pleased to have him as a member and leader of our new Africa team at USIP. Dr. Sani, can I ask you to say a few words before we begin this morning's program? Thank you, Ambassador Hassan. Thank you for this introduction. Dear friends, participants, thank you for taking the time to be here. I could not have wished for a better way to start my first day here at USIP than to sit in the front row of today's event. Today's event results from a productive partnership between Afrobarometer and its founders, members, and partners, including C.D. DiGanna, Michigan State University, USAID, and USIP. This Afrobarometer report illustrates a critical strategy that the newly established Africa Center hopes to continue. That is, on one hand, to work with organizations in Africa to develop knowledge products that capture the reality and perspectives of African through sound and rigorous analysis, just as Ambassador Hassan mentioned. On the other hand, engage with our stakeholders in the US in Africa to disseminate these knowledge products to inform US policies and peace-building and peace-making interventions on the continent, working hand-in-hand with African and African institutions. I also want to thank USID for its unwavering supports and guidance in this project. We are looking forward to continuing to work with USAID to deepen and enrich this partnership. It is now my honor to introduce Susan, who has led this productive endeavor with her team here at USIP. But before, let me apologize because I will not sit till the end of this presentation. Since my first day at USIP is a marathon, I'm jumping from one meeting to the other, so I sincerely apologize. And Susan, please, you have the film. Thank you. Thank you, Sandy, and let me add my welcome and congratulations. I think for all of us, it's an exciting day as we mark really the launch of the Africa Center and look forward to continuing to work with all of our partners to deepen, expand, and engage with all of you as we take the work forward. So I have the pleasure this morning of introducing a tremendous set of panelists who will share with you some of the results of the most recent work by Afrobarometer. We're joined by Dr. Jima Bwadi. I think in many ways who needs no introduction whatsoever. He is currently the interim CEO at Afrobarometer. He is one of the co-founders of Afrobarometer and this idea that has grown to be such a rich milestone and marker for public opinion views across the continent. He served as the executive director from 2008 to 2019. He's also the founder and former executive director of the Ghana Center for Democratic Development and the winner of multiple awards, including the 2017 Martin Luther King Jr. Award for Peace and Social Justice for his work advancing democracy, good governance, and economic opportunity. We're also joined by Dr. Carolyn Logan, who is the director of analysis at Afrobarometer. She also serves as an associate professor at the Department of Political Science at Michigan State University. Welcome Carolyn, great to have you with us. And finally, we have Josephine Sani, who is a regional communications coordinator for West Africa at Afrobarometer and at the Ghana Center for Democratic Development. So I'm going to leave it there and hand it over to Dr. Jima Bwadi to kick us off in the presentation. We'll hear from our panelists. Over the course of the conversation, we welcome you to send in your questions and your comments by Twitter and Facebook. You can follow us along using the hashtag voices Africa. And we'll look forward to bringing all of you into the conversation, which is very much in line with the spirit and principles of what Afrobarometer does elevate voices of people as we move into the discussion section of this program. Dr. Jim over to you. I think you're still muted. Dr. Jim. I missed you at the last presentation we made at the USRT, which happened to be our last public engagement in Washington DC in early March before the lockdown. So it's great to see you again. It's great to see others in the casting who have been in frequent contact and have been talking to frequently. And really, really great to meet Dr. Sani finally and also thanks for resolving the puzzle about your links to our own Josephine Sani. And also just to express how deeply appreciative we are of the USRT for continued and very highly productive engagement and partnership with the Afrobarometer, including the hosting of this webinar and not to mention your facilitation of USA and US governments. Significant funding to the Afrobarometer. Also, really delighted to hear about the setting up of the USRT's Africa Center, which in our view provides an even more solid platform for boosting the uptake of Afrobarometer survey findings and insights into the policy, Africa policy community in the US. And also elsewhere. I want to take this opportunity to report a couple of key milestones on the road to the institutional strengthening of the Afrobarometer. First to report that we have almost completed the process of assembling an international advisory council to provide high-level strategic intelligence and to support linkage of the Afrobarometer to high-level policy actors and prospective funders. And with Ambassador Carson as the pivot, we have been able to attract a high profile and distinguished cast of personalities to become founding members of the international advisory council. And it includes people like President Mohai, former President Mohai of Botswana and Ellen Johnson-Seliff of Liberia, BBC, Talk Show personality, Zena Bedawi, former UGAR, Chief Executive Peter Kellner, Kenya Human Rights Commission Chair, Dr. Willie Mutunga, and former Electoral Commissioner of Nigeria, Professor Atahiru Jega, and on and on. And we are expecting to do call the inaugural meeting of this council somewhere in late November. We are still negotiating with the members. And then the other big piece of news from here is that following my successful resistance to the people's call for me to extend my tenure as CEO of the Afrobarometer, Dr. Dusef Asuka, currently with the Hewlett-Williamson and Flora Hewlett Foundation in Mountain Dew, California, has been appointed to succeed me as CEO of the Afrobarometer, and he will assume to commence his work here in Accra from early 2021. If you quick notes about the Afrobarometer service, the Round 8 service, as many of you know, the Afrobarometer, how to put on hold, is Round 8 service mystery due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which is why we are able to present to you findings from only 18, instead of 35, or 36 countries, we are busy to cover at the end of the cycle of Round 8. But I'm happy also to report that the Afrobarometer is resuming Round 8 data collection in those countries that meet our safety and data quality criteria post the pandemic. We have in fact adopted a number of protocols, including remote technical assistance and also personal protective equipment for the few teams as some of the minimum must meet standards before we embark on field service in any country. We expect to complete Round 8 service in all 35 countries by 2021, after which we will share consolidated findings in our traditional and Africa profiles. But also being an entity that never lets an opportunity or crisis go wasted. We have developed and we are including a batch of questions in the remaining Round 8 service focused on the COVID-19 pandemic and some of its effects and some of the ways in which it has impacted African populations and ways in which they value it, and how we have governments are finding out the pandemic and maybe implications for perceptions and experiences with governance and democracy and economic opportunity in those countries. Finally, the Afrobarometer is also set to conduct its first ever telephone service. This is a pilot that we are undertaking in Namibia on the COVID-19 pandemic and we are certainly going to apply the same rigorous standards that we apply to face to face methodology in our interviews. And that we hope that, depending on the outcome, this sets us a model for future goals on special topics. So now I am highly, highly pleased to invite you to sit back and to take in the exciting findings from the 18 countries covered so far in our Round 8 Afrobarometer service. I will come back to participate in the Q&A session that is going to be immediately after the formal presentations to be led by my equal colleagues Dr Logan and Josephine Sani. So Dr Logan, Josephine Sani, over to you. Thank you Prokima. So as from said earlier, we will only be sharing findings from 18 African countries. We are hoping that by 2021 we will come back with a more complete set of findings. So the already shaded areas basically are the countries, the 18 African countries that we're talking about, and it actually includes interesting findings from new two new countries that are Angola and Ethiopia. Next. So here's an overview of the topics that we're going to be sharing with you today. I will start with findings on citizens priorities and general outlook, and also more findings on popular issues to democracy governance. And then Caroline will say over and share more interesting findings on views on development cooperation and China and the US in the eyes of Africans. So on citizens priorities and the general outlook next. So we've been capturing data on citizens priorities by asking the respondents to identify the most important problems that they want the government to address. And consistently over time we see that unemployment and health have featured as the citizens most valued priorities. So over here we see that unemployment and health are followed by infrastructure, education, water supply and crime and security, all as almost equal levels of importance. But another very interesting thing to note here is that, you know, we collected this data before COVID struck, but we see that even before COVID they have been an increasing importance of health as citizens priorities. So we also ask citizens to tell us which direction they think their country is headed. And over time we see that citizens are quite gloomy about the direction that they think their countries are headed. So we have already about two thirds of Africans saying that their countries are headed in the wrong direction. What is interesting to note that when you look at the countries that have the least proportion of citizens in their countries moving in the wrong direction, we have Ethiopia. It's quite interesting looking at what's happening in the countries right now. So we're sharing data from 18 African countries, right? But if you are going to do the cross the trends over time, we'll be looking at 15 countries that have been trapped consistently from 2011 to 2018. So looking at these 15 countries, we see that there's been a 15 percentage points increase in the proportion of citizens who think their country is heading in the wrong direction. And it's quite prominent soon. We see very drastic changes in almost all the countries, but they're very, very prominent in countries such as Namibia, the Soto and Kivet where the proportions say their countries are headed to the wrong direction are actually more than doubled. But there are also quite interesting decreases in a couple of countries. So if you look at Uganda, the proportion was saying their country is going the wrong direction. It's like half of what we used to be in 2011 to 2013. And Kenya also shows a 14 percentage point in the perception that the country is heading in the wrong direction. Next. So generally, there's an increasing negative perception of the country's direction and also the economic conditions. So as I mentioned earlier, we saw a 15 percentage point decline in the perception that a 15 percentage point increase in the perception that the country is going in the wrong direction. We also have again about two tests of citizens saying that the country's economic conditions are either fairly bad or very bad. And that has absolutely compared to the 2011-2013 figure. It's an increase from 50%. And also we have about half of Africans saying that their country's economic conditions have gotten worse over the preceding 12 months. And that's when you compare it to the 2011-2013 figure. It's an increase from 4 in 10 hours recorded in 2011-2013. Next. So when it comes to popular attitudes towards democracy governance, you know, Afrogrammets are always having lots of data on democracy, but today we are not really going to go into all the full details. But the fundamental message that we'll be sharing with our data today is that over time there's been a fairly high and consistent support for democratic norms and accountable governance among Africans. Next. So looking at this slide, we see that across the 18 countries that have been surveyed so far, and the average African still prefers democratic rule to other forms of governance, right? But you see that it also varies across countries. So it's as high as 90% in Ethiopia and as low as 6-7% in Angola. One thing to note about the Angola finding is that even though we have very low proportions saying that they prefer democracy, we also saw very high levels of people saying they either didn't know or it doesn't matter. So basically the low support for democracy does not necessarily translate into high levels of anti-democracy. It just probably means that they're either uncisive or they're really not sure what they want. And then we have some countries that are basically sitting on the fence like Malawi and Lesotho. We have just about half of the citizens saying that they prefer democracy to other forms of governance. Next. And this is actually my favorite. Over the past few weeks it's been mostly used data points, looking at what's been happening especially in Francophone Africa. We see that the large majorities of Africans still support the idea of imposing the two-term limit on the exercise of presidential power. So when we hear that some presidents want to run for a third term, even the lowest, looking at all the countries, Angola has the lowest but even that is still in the majority. Next. Here we have citizens to choose between a government which is accountable to the people and an efficient government, a government that gets things done. And we see here that an average African values accountability even more highly than efficiency. So, and well, that is actually one of the results that I personally find very intriguing and encouraging. When you look at the trends, you realize that over the years there's been a consistent increase for demand for accountable governance among Africans. Next. So this slide shows the changes in demand for accountable governance since 2011-2013 in the 15 African countries that we track. And we realize that among the 15 African countries, Mali is the only country that recalls a decrease in demand for accountable governance. Countries like Tunisia, Namibia, the Soto, Botswana, the demand for accountable governance remain unchanged. But there are really, really high increases in countries such as Kingfed, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Kenya and Ghana when it comes to demand for accountable governance. Next. So this slide summarizes most of the major findings for demand for democracy. And so generally we see high and pre-study support for democratic ideals. But there's also some level of a substantial decrease. For instance, if you look at the support for elections as a sole legislative method of choosing leaders, right? So we see that it decreased from 83 to about 74, which is not entirely 100% good news. But there is still some hope because it still remains in the majority. We also see that, for instance, support for democracy has also decreased by marginally. But there's some hope because it's still quite in the majority. And we see that when it comes to, for instance, preference for accountable governance, there's been a drastic increase, right? So basically, I would go with the fact that the glass is still half full, even though there's been some few declines in support for democracy from it. So it remains highly steady and still remains high and pre-study, basically. So thank you, Alhambra Botswana and now. Thank you, Josephine and thank you for everyone for joining us today. I'm going to turn now to some findings from a section of special questions that we added in round eight. For those of you who know Afro-Bromader, you know our focus is democracy and governance, and we often tend to focus pretty internally on what's going on within a country and what people think about their own governments. With occasional questions about things beyond borders, but we went a bit further this time in looking kind of beyond borders and how people perceive their relationships with other countries, both within their region and globally. And so we'll share some of the findings from that, starting with some on general development cooperation and financial relationships within the world. We asked people, first of all, we're asking about whether they think that their countries, how much they want autonomy versus support from the outside world. We asked people about whether in their country that they should finance development from their own resources, even if it means paying more taxes, or whether they should continue to rely on external loans and development assistance, even if it increases indebtedness to other countries. What you can see here is that we get, we see strong support, 64% on average, for being autonomous and self-reliant, even if it means increasing taxes. I'll just say as an aside, we have a whole module on taxation in the round eight questionnaire also, which may come up in later presentations where we can explore some of those questions later. But nonetheless, quite interesting that people are willing to openly say they're willing to pay more taxes in order to be more self-reliant and autonomous. Of course, you see there's wide variation across countries as almost always. One of the things, as Josephine mentioned, the gaps here represent the don't-knows, and you'll see consistently that Angola and Golan's maybe are the less used to being surveyed. Maybe other things going on, but they tend to have much higher levels of don't-know. But we see that there's not a real, we have at the bottom end people, oops, excuse me, sorry. Among the countries that are most interested in continuing to get external assistance, we have both some of the wealthier countries like Cabo Verde and some of the least wealthy like Malawi and the same at the high end. We've got Gabon in Tunisia, but also Mali, opting for self-reliance system, very diverse but interesting findings there. We also ask about conditionality when countries do receive loans and development assistance and how accepting are people of conditionality. And we'll come back to this issue in the section on China and US in a few minutes, but one of the things you'll see here, we asked about two types of conditionality. First, whether countries who offer loans should be able to direct spending decisions from the governments that are receiving those loans. We see that's rejected by 54% who opt for countries being able to make their own decisions about their spending, even when they're getting loans. We also asked about political conditionality and whether lending governments should be able to place conditions on democracy and human rights achievements within the countries, the recipient countries. Somewhat more acceptance of that but still rejected by 50% who want their governments to be able to make their own decisions about these things. On the other hand, looking towards trade side of things, we see quite a bit of openness to interaction across borders. We asked first about protection of local producers versus openness to trade. In this case, you see that on average countries are roughly evenly divided, 49% saying they prefer open trade, 47% preferring protection from foreign competition. Quite again, a wide range Tunisians and quite closed to foreign trade, preferring protection, whereas Ugandans, Burkinawes, Malians all very open to foreign trade across borders. So quite a wide range. Angolans again, more uncertain in their opinions, which is something we'll keep seeing. But when we then ask about whether countries should be allowing foreign traders, foreign corporations to trade and consumer goods in their countries, which is the black bars here versus only allowing nationals to trade and be more closed and restricted. We see that there's a strong preference in favor of openness to foreign foreigners involved in trade, foreign corporations, foreign individuals being allowed. Again, some range, less wide range on this question than on many, although still we have countries, Malawi and Cabo Verde that really are very open to foreign trade whereas Gabon and Ghana less open to it, more ambivalent or more balanced between the two. But overall we see that generally we have a preference for autonomy and openness rather than closing borders to outside forces. And the suggestion would be that overall diplomacy is preferred to economic, the wielding of economic or political power in terms of interacting with African governments. We then in this module on globalism and the outward look took a deeper dive into attitudes around China and the US in the eyes of Africans. Obviously this comes up in the lot of debates and discussions going on about the increasing role and presence of China in Africa, something that's caused some concerns in the US about whether this will affect US influence in the region. And so we looked into this in further depth. We started with a question that asked about a number of different countries and a number of different organizations just asking people whether the influence of that country or organization was mostly positive in their country or mostly negative. And the green bars show the mostly positive view so you can see in general again we see quite an openness towards, towards outside countries and outside organizations. The large white gaps are the don't know so many people don't have an opinion don't know about some of the regional organizations may not be aware for example of Russia's influence in their country. But you see that that that the negatives generally remain pretty modest across all categories. The former colonial power being a modest exception to that in terms of the positives, you can see China and the US both viewed quite positively by solid majorities. One of the things that I will note here that is particularly important I think is that, especially in the context of a conversation where we're concerned about who's having more influence are we doing better are we doing worse as the US is that the positive attitudes toward China and the US are quite highly correlated. People on the ground are not seeing this as an either or we want to be friends with one enemies with the other or something along those lines they're very, very positively and highly correlated so we want to ask people about what is the best what country could be the best model for their own country's development and we give them a number of choices but also offer them the chance to offer their own suggestion their own suggestion or to say that they should follow their own countries model. And in this area that United States is still regarded across Africa as the most preferred model by 32% about one in three China follows with 23% those proportions are not very much changed from the past the gap has narrowed a little bit. You can see the former colonial power comes into 11% South Africa and Southern Africa in particular South Africa ranks quite increasingly highly as a model, and about 7% said that they prove for their own model of development. I think I'll note here just that isn't shown in this chart but that I think is an interesting finding is that that the preference for the US, if we break it down by age categories, preference for the US as a model is actually highest among the youngest cohort and lower among older cohorts, whereas the preference for China stays roughly constant across all the age cohorts. There's of course wide variations across countries in terms of how people view the US and China as a model but you'll see that across the 18 we've surveyed so far, only three Burkina Faso Mali and then Botswana here prefer China as a model although in Burkina Faso and Mali that's by quite significant margins. On the other hand, in a number of the West African countries we still see quite strong preference for the US model and gone on Cabo Verde Sierra Leone, and also in East Africa, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda all have strong preference and as well angle our newest addition so quite a wide variation. Of course, some of the future work we'll be doing will be looking at how some of these findings track against levels of investment and and development assistance coming from each country and those sorts of things. When we look over time again Josephine mentioned that we can compare across countries over time in this case we asked a handful of questions on attitudes about China in around around six which was 2014 to 2015. So we can compare a little bit over time. In this case we can see that preference for China as a model has not really changed much over time just by one point on average, although what we really see which is interesting and I don't. I don't know the details of what China's been doing in Burkina Faso but but the preference for China as a model in Burkina Faso has has shot up in a maybe it's declined by a fair amount, as well as a couple of other countries but overall relatively steady. What is a little bit less, we see a little bit more change on the question of how positive or negative China's influence has been this shows the darker bars show the the positive influence in in the round eight surveys whereas the lighter bars show the round six surveys. And you can see there's been across the 16 countries where we compare, can compare about a five point drop in perceptions of China's positive influence and that holds across basically every country there's been a slight decline except in just a couple where we see slight increases in positive perceptions, only a couple of Gabon and Namibia where we see quite substantial drops but just a maybe as familiarity increases with China's role and its interventions and some things that will come to around loans and debt that maybe perceptions have waned slightly. We see more decline when we ask about the level how how influential China is in their country in our round six surveys across 16 countries 71% said that they had some some or a lot of influence and that's dropped quite substantially to 56% in this survey. The perceptions of influence are declining the only place where they've stayed really steady but also very high is Cabo Verde. You can see other countries and Sierra Leone where the perception has really plummeted. Again, things that we need to explore further as we as we combine our findings with other data about China's investment and and role in some of these countries. We also ask people about Chinese loans and development assistance. Certainly this has been a big topic of conversation is certainly one of the things that that the US has been to some degree warning about is the possibility of sort of a debt trap with China that that that money might come too easily and and then the repayment becomes catches people by surprise to some degree. We ask people first just whether they've heard of China giving loans and development assistance to their country, about half had said that they did although this again varies very widely from Kenya, where the loan levels are quite high to Nigeria and and a couple of other countries where less than a quarter of have have heard about the assistance. We then asked those people who had heard of the assistance to questions the first is whether they thought that their countries were required to pay those loans repay those loans. And you can see that's the gold bars about 77%. So three quarters did understand that a lot of the assistance that they're getting from China is does need to be repaid so there's a fairly high level of awareness about it. We then asked people whether they thought their governments had borrowed too much money from China, somewhat less but still a majority 58% say yes. Again, this we want to track this across the handful of countries that are really most heavily indebted to China but you can see one of those countries is Kenya where the levels of debt are quite high. Another Angola Nigeria where where debt levels are all quite high. On the other hand in Lesotho and Botswana's people are much less inclined to be concerned about that. Finally, we asked a question about China's conditionality compared to other countries because this goes back to the earlier conditionality questions certainly Loans from the West have often been perceived or known to come with some degree of conditions on spending on or on democracy human rights criteria. We asked people whether they thought that the loans from China came with more or less conditions than loans from other parts of the world. The purple bars are those who thought they had fewer requirements and so we see a plurality 41% say that they have fewer requirements compared to 24% who thought China puts more conditions on. There's a couple of countries Gabon Burkina Faso and Lesotho where people think that China is more likely to put conditions but in most countries, the plurality said less conditions. So there's some awareness around the differences but not completely widespread. Overall, what I think we see here is that with the generally positive attitudes towards China generally positive regard for their influence alongside the influence of the US is that the efforts to suggest that the Chinese influence is negative or dangerous somehow maybe aren't really taking hold. And that people are really more inclined towards being concerned about whether governments are willing to engage with them on the issues and the problems and the priorities that matter to them the most, as opposed to who specifically they're coming from. The last thing we'll say on this just in terms of looking towards the future and whether we're seeing shifts in an interesting area which is the question about what international language children should be learning in schools and this is one place where we really don't see a shift yet. When we asked this question of 71% still say English is the international language of choice for their children 14% French of course in the Francophone countries, just 2% Chinese so the efforts that China has been making and in some regards to promote Chinese culture and language are still have some distance to go in terms of taking hold. And I will leave it there. And I think we'll open it up for questions and discussion under Susan's leadership. Thank you. Great. And colleagues thank you so much for what is always an incredibly rich presentation. I know there are already questions coming in for those who are joining us if you'd like to ask a question. You can use the chat box box function that's just below the video player on the US IP event page. You can also send any of your questions on Twitter or Facebook using the hashtag voices Africa. As soon as those questions start to come in. I'm going to take the prerogative here as moderator and and try to get our conversation going and I so appreciate that that in this round that you added some questions about this this question of global power competition, because I think one of the concerns that we hear consistently is that the narrative tends to be about China and Africa or other global powers, and we're losing sight of what are African priorities and African voices and you really elevated that in in these set of responses. I was wondering if if there's any correlation that can be made between the findings related to people's demands for accountable governance and their perspectives about different development models, or their views on conditionality of aid and assistance, or their views on influence of China in their domestic policies, because I think this is one of the other narratives that we often hear and I'm just wondering if there's anything that the data might tell us in that regard. Well, those are great questions I think that the data absolutely could tell us something in those regards those are things that we, you know that that would be questions for sort of our next level of exploration. You know just so people understand where we are at this point you know we've done the 18 countries we're getting ready to do 18 more so we're trying to start analyzing the original data but this is kind of our first cut look and what will be coming out over the next and in fact the next couple of years will be a lot of looking more in depth but I think those are fantastic questions for us to look at because we we have all of those things and looking at how the global attitudes compared to some of their attitudes about their own politics as you suggested accountability and the kinds of demands people are making on their own governments, as well as those taxation questions and some of the other things you know I mean it's one hand people say that they are would rather be taxed and fund their but I think we of course need to look more into the the the taxation data that we've gathered and see whether that that carries through into what people's attitudes are about their willingness to pay taxes when you get down to sort of more concrete concrete levels of it so I put this down as questions for our next to our next layers of analysis on this. Great, and I realize we'll probably have lots of big questions that maybe do. The danger in kind of doing the first cut presentation because it's like we all have so many questions about where to go with this and really we're just kind of, you know, doing the first look at what are the results and and where do we want to get deeper so suggestions are welcome. That's great. Well, maybe I'll stick a little bit on this question of influence and external influence, something that we've been thinking about a lot and looking at a lot is the influence of some of the Gulf and Middle Eastern countries in the Horn of Africa and I'm just curious. Again, this might be something for future analysis, but I'm curious whether anything popped up to your recollection in any of the survey results from Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda that point pointed to any of those countries and their potential influence, particularly as it relates to democracy and the transitions that are ongoing in Sudan and Ethiopia. That's interesting. I'm not sure if Jim will recall any of this but those countries have not when we ask about what countries are the best models. We did not include any of the Gulf States or Middle East in the question about whether different countries and organizations that had positive or negative influence. And they do not get volunteered as countries as models. I mean, there may be a handful of cases and I have not looked specifically at Ethiopia data on that but it tends to be that when we ask about those model countries, people do tend to still look pretty globally at the sort of superpower type influencers and formal colonial powers as opposed to influencers more in their neighborhood. I think we're seeing a little bit of shift in that direction with South Africa being mentioned as frequently as it was as a model, but generally the view when we talk about models tends to still be sort of at the global powers as opposed to the regional powers. Jim, I was going to add that that is the type of question that we can respond to better when we come around to taking a deep dive at the data because we didn't leave respondents the option of right to be any country or power they wanted to cite. And I haven't looked at the at the home of Africa, East Africa, South Africa, West Africa, for instance, as some can write a number of responses respondents cited gun as a model. And then we saw that Southern African respondents send it to sites South Africa as a model. So we will take a closer look at what we've got from the respondents of this Ethiopia adventure when we come back to Kenya and others. Great. I'm getting some questions that are coming through from participants but just want to encourage people that, you know, in line with with the philosophy behind Afrobarometer we want to let people have their say and speak their voices here. So we look forward to your questions and your comments. I have one more question on the data and then and then maybe we can talk a little bit about what what it all means and some of your perspectives but Josephine you mentioned. I think that there was a distinction in in youth perspectives on one of the findings and I'm just wondering if there there are any other broad trends that you saw in relation to youth perceptions. This is because I think as we talk about the potential on the continent we talked about the demographic trends and trajectories on the continent, and we see this continued demand for for both democracy and accountable governance, understanding what's what's happening on a generational basis I think could be incredibly helpful in reshaping policies and understanding. I think when it comes to the youth, I will talk about what you consider to be the most important problem, and that's consistently being on and for everything. And I don't know if you remember the presentation with that last year, when we talked about migration with around seven data, we realize that the most. So the most critical group of people who really have considered migration with the youth and the idea keeps it. And the most important reason decided or wanted to leave their countries was unemployment. Also when you look at how the great government's performance in resolving the issue of unemployment consistently is below. So when it comes to the youth, one of the most important problems are unemployment and education. And so when you compare that to the elderly, the youth are far more likely to prioritize youth and education than the eldest and when it comes to the the grading of how all government is doing in resolving the problem of unemployment is, I think it's consistent even across all the age groups consistently degree their governments for years. So maybe I can pay you back then into one of the questions that came up in the chat, which relates to leadership, because I think one of the premises behind the research is to help to lay out priorities that leadership should be responding to, both in terms of actual delivery and communication strategies. And so, Josephine, you've just laid out the unemployment and jobs remain a central need and a priority. What other aspects would you draw out very preliminarily based on the data that you have so far in terms of what could help to strengthen and improve the quality of leadership from a general perspective on the findings to date? If I may comment, then it's judging from the consistency with which we've had unemployment, health and education and infrastructure frequently mentioned as the top most priority for ordinary citizens. It's clear that on economic and social policy development, social development are leaders who do much better if they responded positively to this need. On the political governance democracy question, again it's clear from the consistency of the responses we've had over time that virtually no African, including African youth, is supportive of the idea of perpetual incumbency for the president. And therefore, their term limit, reaching term limits across the country, on some places on the continent, definitely are variance with the popular voices of folks in that country. Same, you know, sometimes you do hear a lot of talk that Africans will be happy, so much happy to get an effective government that even if it's unaccountable, they will prefer that. But again, there's consistency in the findings that that is not what pleases ordinary Africans that if you are a leader who wants to align with your people, you should be working on your accountability challenge. And I'll just add to that, that the other area that we see so I mean there's been mentioned the whole aspect of being responsive to the expressed needs of the population and ways that people see concretely and that solve their problems. In a more conceptual sense, you know, Jim has mentioned the accountability in the other area where we see leadership consistently get really low and at least until recently declining ratings is in terms of how well they listen to people I think there's a real we see consistently through our data real perception that people get elected and they're gone. And, and, you know, they're they're not developing connections with their constituents they're not perceived as listening to what the constituents needs are and responding to them so sort of the accountability and responsiveness both I think are aspects of that really be addressed. Also to add to the primary points of about listening to the people, we actually have a module of youth in around a data and we asked the citizens to choose between two statements that they agree with. So the first one was that in order for the country to progress, we should listen to the fresh ideas of the youth. And then the second choice was whether we should keep listening to the wisdom of the elders and surprisingly we have a majority of Africans saying that we should rather listen to the wisdom of the elders and that actually includes a majority of the youth. But I think if governments are actually going to put together initiatives that would help with youth development and all that then inclusive, including the youth in these decision making is also very important. But it appears that even the youth do not know the power that they their voices have. So they also sort of want to defend to the elders and you know face the elders but I think the voices of the youth are very critical when it comes to policies that are aimed at youth development. I think those are really interesting findings and you know the challenge all those with quantitative data is you have to present people with a dichotomy of choices that really at the end of the day a public policy decision doesn't need to be a dichotomy of those hopefully it's an integration of those in the same way that you know a lot of scientists spend their time refuting the notion that a democratic government cannot be an effective Christian government. So that's I think that's a useful bridge to build out. So let me turn a little bit to a specific geography. And we had a question about the decreased demand for accountable governance in Mali, and maybe a little bit of surprise, given the events that have taken place over the summer, and in the last month or so and I'm just wondering if you can maybe tell us a little bit more about when the research was done. And if you have any theories around what seems to be a slightly incongruous results and the political trajectory that we've seen. That's a great question and we actually. So the Mali survey was the last one that we were able to finish field work before we shut down so it took place in March of this year. So before the major developments of the last few months in the country. And in fact, I mean, we've, we've got some stuff that we've published on this because as soon as the, the, the cool and things happen in Mali we took started to take a close look at the Mali data. And what you could really see sort of across the board in Mali was how hugely frustrated people were with the current state of affairs. And, and I think that is reflected in the accountability finding in the sense that I mean you saw decreasing support for democracy decreases across a lot of people really saying we're really unhappy we see corruption increasing hugely we see leadership performance going down seriously satisfaction with democracy going way down. So people were really frustrated and wanting change and I think that the decline which actually this relatively modest in the accountability finding is pretty consistent with that people are just like this just isn't working. And so that I think that kind of is one finding that embodies that many ways. And what we also saw just to say the other findings that were in this work. You know, one of the things that was a big concern for the international community and Molly's neighbors in the region was the extent to which it seemed like the coup, the military coup was welcomed. What you see in the data is that there's a high level of trust in the military and so in that sense that was not too surprising but at the same time, despite all this sort of frustration and the dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs, still quite solid support for the system of government so our reading of it was sort of people are so unhappy and so concerned about their situation they don't feel that they can wait three, I think three or four years to the next election. They trust the military to a significant degree so a military intervention in that sense was tolerable but they still want to go back to democracy this isn't something where they're saying yeah come in and you know stop this. I think it's it with our take would be it would be probably seen as a very transitional option that people just felt like they were in such dire straits that that it was the best option they had available. So, I see Ambassador Carson might want to. No, I did know I think Carolyn your comments about Molly your spot on so I have no no comments here if I could Susan ask two or three things quickly. One I noticed in your data that two or three of the African countries which have and are known to have some of the strongest democracies on the continent had greater favorability for China and Chinese engagement than US or Western engagement. I'm speaking specifically of Botswana and Cape Verde in particular, where there was a higher receptivity to to appear to be a higher receptivity for China. Then, for the US. And so I was wondering about that and there were a couple of others where democracy is is is taken a stronger roots stronger whole but have more favorable impressions of China than the than the US. And so that was of interest to me. The other thing of interest on the economic side is what can we tell from the data about what the African Union and what African leaders will have to do to make serious progress on the African free trade zone. There were some very good indicators at one end but there are also some indications of countries that aren't is open and receptive to to free trade and wanted to know there and then the third one that's a big one to for everyone. Did you do anything with respect to climate change and attitudes about climate change or perceptions that climate change is a growing and serious national and continental problem. Emma, do you want to start or you want me to your first one. Again, the question about African citizens openness to the values and the initiatives coming under the Africa content free free trade agreement. I think some of that is the game going to require disengaging the data by region by by sub region. So we get a sense of how West Africans look at these issues. So I think in the minds of many ordinary Africans, it's all about regional trade as opposed to continental. But we'll take a good look at that. But given given that in general, people are. The polarity of respondents say they open to to free trade a free trade and contrary to our surprise in about the strong support for for open or open trade relative to the other. But I think it did die. There is also data from the previous round of the survey that we can bring in to compliment the rounded findings to be able to respond adequately to this. And this is about that popular preferences support for free movement of goods and people across border. And in the last survey, we there was clearly very strong support for free movement of people and goods across the borders. At the same time that people say they have experienced a great deal of difficulty crossing their borders to other countries in the region. And just a couple of things to add. I mean, I think the other on the on the kind of free trade zone questions is in a sense that one of the things that you could also be doing is address the don't knows. I mean, there's, you know, still, I mean, as Jim has said, we tend to see quite a high levels of support in most countries, some countries that are exceptions where maybe information campaigns are in part warranted. But the other part of it is that the levels of don't knows that we see and people who aren't familiar with the issues or don't have a have an idea on the issue that are maybe sort of most amenable to being convinced if if the right information is is in their hands. So on climate change, we, we did a significant module for the first time in round seven on climate change and have some information out there from that module. Definitely awareness and this is one of the Jim just mentioned a question that caught him by surprise the widespread, how widespread awareness of climate change as a problem was was one of the things that caught me by surprise to some degree that people understood it in those terms. And we've, and definitely people see it as an issue that's causing problems for their countries. We do have, we don't have the full module and round eight but we've got we've kept some of the questions to kind of track over time and round eight I have not yet taken a look at that to see if things are getting better or people's perceptions are getting better or worse but we that is an issue we've added in also that I think is important. You also asked about the favorability you know it's it's an interesting question that some of the most democratic countries. Botswana is the one that stands out the most I think preferred China as a model whereas you know another Ghana is is the opposite and so I, I don't see on the surface of it a real direct pattern in there in terms of, you know, democracies are more or less open towards China's influence or some of the other things and that that also holds in terms of some of the conditionality questions and some of the other things even on sort of the conditionality around, you know, conditionality based on democracy and human rights. You see a couple of the more democratic countries on the continent actually in favor of that kind of conditionality you know you don't know, perhaps people see it as as having help them get where they are and not sure but but you also see a couple of the democratic countries among those most likely to reject that kind of conditionality so again I think that you know there's there's things going on there and I think that data we really need to bring into it is some of the data about the different levels of investment in different countries I was just at a webinar the other day where they were talking about you know there's there's a lot of concerns about the indebtedness to China on the continent but that there's really just about 10 countries that have the vast majority of that debt and so comparing those to some of the others that kind of thing maybe one of the things that will help us kind of parse out what's going on there. So in our two minutes that remain I have one small question, and then one big question, and we'll ask you to give me just a quick thought on the big question maybe this the I think relatively easy question is from our audience and what are the what are the principal sources of information for those who participated in the survey do we have a sense of whether their their perceptions are informed by traditional media by social media or other sources. And my big question is there there seems to be a significant gap between where people see countries heading in the wrong direction and high expectations. And on one hand we could see that as a great risk right you pointed out Ethiopia where the expectations and hopes for democracy are the highest, and yet things seem to be heading in the wrong direction. On the other hand we've seen that animate some really positive and in some cases peaceful change. And so I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts about how do we understand when things are really moving in in the opposite direction and where where we think that this may land things in the coming months. So in the the minutes that remain with us any quick thoughts to close out. Well, first on the first question about where people may have drawn the knowledge and information that they used to in responding to the environmental questions we do have questions about where people get source information from so we will take a closer look at the findings there and then use that to interpret the data and be able to give you a response. That's another deep dive analysis we are here to do. Yeah, and I was just trying to pull up our news feed numbers but I don't have the numbers at hand but I mean definitely what we've been seeing is a big shift towards social media I mean still traditional sources, radio and television especially has really come up are still the main sources but with with social media and internet news coming up in terms of the big picture question and expectations I mean I think it's a great question I mean to me the the whole idea that expectations are increasing is great news and you know I mean you do have the danger that unmet expectations are, you know, can can undermine support for a government or a regime, but you know I think if anything to me in the past it's looked more like the opposite is a problem that people are willing to accept too little and don't you know sort of getting together and voicing that that demand for accountability or for more concrete things I think is great news and something that we will really be pushing out there because you know especially in some of the countries there's a few countries where I'd say Mozambique Namibia Tanzania have tended to be among them where we felt like governments that are performing less well by many standards especially not as much Namibia but some of the others are nonetheless rated quite highly by their citizens and to me that sort of identifies an expectations gap where expectations are fairly low and and they're being met and so to the extent that we're seeing rising expectations I think it's great news, Gina. I'll also venture one broad interpretation of this seemingly contradictory thing. Basically as you do this I say for now we think the country is going this ahead in the wrong direction but we still go hope we still have expectations we're still hopeful. You is your responsibility as government and as our leaders not to disappoint us. So for leaders it's a challenge not to disappoint their people and for citizens it's a signal to government that will give you a chance to prove yourself. Wonderful. Well we always get to the really good conversation right at the end. I want to say thank you, Dr. Jima, Carolyn and Josephine to you and to all of your partners who I know do the tremendous courageous complicated work. These are I think incredibly helpful and as we constantly try to think about why why does Africa matter to the United States. I think it really underlines your research findings consistently show that the values that the US talks about are exactly the values that Africans are pursuing themselves. And whether it's accountable governance or democracy or transparency, self-reliance, I mean these are things that really match and I think that's important to keep at the forefront. So we wish you the very best in the next phase of the research. We wish you health and safety to everybody and look forward to returning to the conversation later this year when you have more of the findings and we can ask harder questions even at that point. Let me thank everybody who joined us online for participating in the conversation. Ambassador Carson, thanks for being with us and opening it up and I wish everybody a good afternoon and evening. Thank you. Thank you and good to see you all. I will be in touch again and we will have occasion to have a similar event on the other set of findings very soon. Thank you all. Thank you.