 Okay. Good afternoon everyone from Helsinki and welcome to this wider webinar. My name is Rachel Gisselquist. I'm a senior research fellow here and I'm very, very pleased to chair this session. Today our focus is the Afrobarometer, which is a Pan-African nonpartisan survey research network that provides data on African experiences and evaluations of democracy, governance and quality of life. At UNU wider, we've used Afrobarometer data in several of our projects. I've used it in several of my projects and we're really delighted to be joined today by Professor Emmanuel Jimavuati and Dr. Joseph Asunka. They will introduce the Afrobarometer project's origins, its achievements, discuss the change that it has contributed to governance in Africa, and they will also introduce the newly developed SDG Sustainable Development Goals scorecards. Professor Jimavuati is co-founder and board chair of the Afrobarometer. He is also co-founder and former executive director of the Ghana Center for Democratic Development, a leading independent democracy and good governance think tank in Accra. He is a former professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Ghana and has held various other faculty and research positions in the United States as well. In honor of his contributions to research and policy, he has received, among other honors, the Distinguished Africanists of the Year from the African Studies Association, the Martin Luther King Jr. Award for Peace and Social Justice, and the Republic of Ghana's highest national award, the Order of Volta. Dr. Joseph Asunka is the current CEO of Afrobarometer. He was previously program officer in the Global Development and Population Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and a lecturer in political science at the University of California Los Angeles. He also has a long relationship with the Afrobarometer. He served as a data manager for the Afrobarometer before his PhD studies at UCLA. And he works, his own research and his publications are focused in particular in the areas of distributive politics, elections and electoral processes, and migration. Before I move on to the presentation, just a bit of background on how things will work today. So our speakers will present for about 30, 35 minutes or so, and then we will open the floor for questions. So please do think about questions you would like to ask our speakers as they as they give their presentations. During the presentations, you should feel free to put questions in the chat box at the bottom of your screen. And then as time permits, we will get to as many of these questions as we can. And I will, if time permits, unmute a few of you to ask your questions live. So without further ado, let me move on to our speakers. I think the first speaker will be Professor Jim Oboade, please, Professor. Thank you, Rachel, for the introduction. And thank you, you and Wyda, for the opportunity to present to you information about the Afrobarometer and why in our view is an indispensable resource for effective research and policymaking on Africa and on African societies and peoples. Here is the context for the for the founding of the Afrobarometer. So scholars of political behavior and social phenomena have scrutinized virtually every aspect of the opinions of American and European voters and to a lesser extent those of Latin America. And yet, until recently and for all kinds of reasons, virtually nothing was known about the values, preferences, knowledge, or interest of the mass of the of humanity living in Africa. Instead, at least aspects, so-called aspects, media, pandits, opinion leaders, and especially politicians reported to know what ordinary Africans think and feel. And these views and opinions who often presented as if they are the views of and preferences of ordinary Africans. Well, what harm was done by this? One way to appreciate the harm that was done by all of this was that by 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, very few of us, if any, seemed to be aware of the fact that the African continent stood on the verge of breaking its authoritarian chains and embarking on a wide range of democratic experiments. Well, we are happy and proud to say today that the Afrobarometer has helped to change this situation. And we've done so with almost no drama. So this is really the introduction, the grand introduction to the Afrobarometer, you know, that in conventional wisdom, for the most part, held that it's a continent whose people are impoverished and hard pressed in their lives. And so they wouldn't care much about democracy or human rights. But what has happened in Africa since 1989 or since the nineties, and especially what the Afrobarometer has helped us to know about African attitudes has helped to change that. So what's the Afrobarometer? It's the premier Pan-African organization dedicated to tracking the experiences, evaluations and perspectives of ordinary African citizens on political, economic and social development in their respective countries. And especially injecting these findings into policy processes at the national, continental and global levels. We have been amplifying or we have helped to amplify the voices of ordinary Africans in the over 20 years or so we've been on the scene. And the Afrobarometer we are proud to say is now African owned and African managed. And it's done so with adherence to maximum scientific research standards and methodology. We cover much of Africa. Our coverage represents roughly 70 to 80 percent of the African population. Interviewed in eight rounds of surveys so far, beginning from 1999. We've done in fact a total of 219 surveys in 39 countries. Not only have we done that and published many of some of our findings in thousands and hundreds of publications and books and so on. We have helped to build the capacity of a young generation of Africans to undertake this type of research, analyze this type of data and to share those findings with at least their national audiences with their national governance and democracy stakeholders. And hopefully the Afrobarometer so far is a public good. All our data is published on the Afrobarometer website and this is complemented by a free online data analysis tool. I'm also happy to share with you the outcome of an organizational and institutional development process we embarked on some three, four years ago, which has enabled us to move from an organic network network to a viable African institution. This process resulted in the incorporation of the Afrobarometer as an independent corporate legal entity based in Accra. It also has come with the constitution of a board of directors of the Afrobarometer to oversee our corporate governance. And I am proud and honored to be the chair of the Afrobarometer. Some of whose board members are projected on the screen, two co-founders of the Afrobarometer, Professor Michael Bratton and Professor Mattis. And then three entirely new comments to the Afrobarometer. Amman Medani, who is a social development specialist with the UN in Geneva. Amina Oyagola, who is a retired MTN corporate executive and also a woman's leadership and entrepreneurship, promoting a person in their own private capacity. And then Mrs. Lara Taylor appears, who is the auditor general of Sierra Leone. We've also incorporated an international advisory council that provides high level strategic intel to the Afrobarometer and helps us to link to policy actors and prospective funders. And we will just have a short project for you, some of the members of the International Advisory Council of the Afrobarometer, which is chaired by distinguished U.S. diplomat, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Johnny Carson. And whose members include former President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson-Serly, Ms. Jena Badawi, current chair of SOAS, and international broadcaster that needs no introduction. It has Professor Jega, formerly the head of the Election Commission of Nigeria. It has Dr. William Itunga, former Chief Justice of Kenya. And many others, as you can see there, and Dr. Vera Sungwe is on as an observer and a counselor. We are particularly proud of the fact that, and I speak for myself as well, I believe for my colleagues, that the founding leadership of the Afrobarometer has transferred power and authority to a new crop of leaders, more dynamic, younger, more imaginative, to take the Afrobarometer forward from its 20th year into its third decade and beyond. And this is the group which is now ably headed by Dr. Joseph Pasunka, as the Chief Executive Officer, and from whom you will be, from whose own mouth you will be hearing a presentation shortly. I'm also happy to say that the Afrobarometer has emerged from a severe funding crisis it met in 2016, to a much improved financial viability. One that has been anchored by Cedar, Sweden, USA, the Mohit Rahim Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, and European Societies Foundation, and African Regional Office. And happy to say also that just this year, and reflecting the fact that the Afrobarometer's financial situation, at least in the short term and to some extent in the medium term, is looking better and better, we've received for the first time funding from the European Union, and then Mastercard Foundation, Gaze Foundation, and then the Gaze Foundation and the Web Band have returned to the pool of Afrobarometer funders. But this is all also to advertise that we are still far from the kind of achieving the financial viability, especially for the medium and especially long term of the Afrobarometer, which appears to be one of the key goals and objectives of the new CEO. And I hope we can count on all of you to help him to meet that goal. So just to incidentally to talk about the priorities of the new CEO, is to basically position the Afrobarometer to play a far more prominent role in this in sub-regional and regional policymaking and related processes than it has done today. It's been able to do today. And also for the Afrobarometer to build and grow a rapid response infrastructure so that we can share and analyze the Afrobarometer data in real time and to contribute to policy debates, policy issues. And the SDG Tracker we have developed is an example of what we intend to do and why we are happy to share that with you. And then also the plan is to exponentially strengthen capacity in conducting research and analysis of the Afrobarometer type, first among our staff and network, but also among African universities and research institutions and hopefully other Africa policy relevant institutions on the continent whose own staff can use some understanding and appreciation of how to use data in their analysis and in their development of their programs. So now let me talk a little about Afrobarometer as a great resource for effective policymaking so long as you are making policy that relates to Africans or that are meant for Africans. So we say if you are a policymaker you must want to know what the people think and want and if you are that kind of policymaker then you must tend to the Afrobarometer because the Afrobarometer data provides independent reality check on official reports and claims. So for instance the Afrobarometer public poverty index measures citizen's experience of deprivation of basic necessities regardless of macroeconomic indicators. It measures quality instead of mere presence or quantity or even impulse. It measures outputs as felt by people and it measures it helps to understand citizen's priority because one of our standard questions on all the service is to ask in your opinion what are the most important problems facing this country that government should address. Sorry so and then we also provide data that can help a policymaker that's an African policymaker an African related policymaker scope the kinds of problems and challenges that are on hand. So for example it helps to know that on migration one in three Africans say they have considered immigration including half of young adults on the average many of whom are highly educated and so on and it helps to know that many of them are simply looking for jobs or a way out of poverty and that they have their eyes more on other African countries than on Europe or on North America or for climate change it helps to know that most families in Tanzania may not have heard of climate change and that if you are going to be able to address this challenge the challenge of climate change in Tanzania and you want public support for it then you want to increase climate change awareness among your citizens. Again the afro-bameter data is easily disaggregatable by country, region, gender, urban, rural location, education, age group, party affiliation and so and in this way afro-bameter data enables you to better target your interventions. Then also it helps the data helps to secure a sound footing for action and for intervention. So for instance three fourths of Africans say they support presidential term limits including countries that don't even have term limit provisions in their constitution. So if you want to do advocacy with the country or dialogue with the country's government as European Union, as Finland, as G7 country, G8, G20, afro-bameter data can help your cause. Now it's also flattering for us to know that afro-bameter data is used in global governance indicators all over including the Ibrahim index, Economist Intelligence Unit, UNDP, Web Bank, USA, Transparency International and others. And very soon as we advertise we'll be sharing with you the afro-bameter SDG scorecard for tracking progress towards 12 of the 17 SDGs. Then also there are many instances of afro-bameter in absolute. So in Sierra Leone for instance the government cited afro-bameter findings in 2017 as the impetus for embarking on a program to address corruption in that country more systematically and to launch a program called No Right Citing Lady Data. Then again in 2019 the High Court of Botswana cited afro-bameter data on tolerance in what as an evidence of the country's readiness to embrace and tolerate homosexuality. I must say that this same finding in some countries, some of the same findings on homophobic attitudes have also been used by bigots to promote LGBT harassment and attack legislation. So this data is cut both ways. And more recently afro-bameter data has provided great insights in why the public of Guinea supported the coup, welcomed the coup makers in their country, but also it has pointed out that Guineans nonetheless consistently reject military rule. So welcoming the military intervention doesn't mean they want the military to stay on beyond their welcome. So what are some of the challenges that we face? Challenge number one, not surprised to any of you is the challenge of natural disasters which we can predict which we cannot, we can only try to live with and manage as best as we could. So a typical example is COVID-19 which compelled us to suspend around a fieldwork for seven whole months in 2020 and therefore delay the completion of our COVID, of our round eight service. Even then as afro-bameter we made lemonade out of lemons and we used, we took it as an opportunity and an invitation to develop especially a COVID module capturing the pandemic's impact on citizens and the evaluations of government responses to the pandemic which we'll be sharing as part of the round eight cross-continental data releases. We also use the opportunity to improve our system for working remotely and to pilot cell phone surveys and so on. Another challenge we frequently face is the challenge of conducting surveys in autocratic post-authoritarian and post-conflict societies where respondents tend to be suspicious of interviewer motives and sometimes view their response that the interviewers are government agents where there's a tendency for respondents to be guarded in their responses to politically sensitive questions for fear of negative repressions and where we always have to put in place extraordinary safety and security precautions for our national partners and for our field workers. Another problem we face is that the African population is still largely semi-literate increasingly semi-literate more than illiterate but still not sufficiently competent in the ability to conduct self-administered, we cannot conduct self-administered surveys online or by pen or by paper because of the population that we deal with and there is a tendency for these respondents to be suspicious of strangers who can interview them because even today it is still a relatively new experience for many of our respondents and there are a lot of challenges in understanding the questions especially scale questions that require them to sort of give the scale of responses how much you know what roughly how much, how deeply, how partly those kinds of things. The other challenge is the challenge of data use. First there is a tendency for people and especially politicians or policymakers to resist and to not to reject public attitude data especially when they deem the findings as unflattering or politically unfavorable and so just to give you an example when the former president of the deposed president of Guinea was presented with the findings from the Guinea alphabet around 77 showing that 80 percent of his of adults in his country supported term limits. He said that was all a fabrication. Then also very often we face questions about methodology often from people who really have they speak more from a position of ignorance than from knowledge but somehow they tend to seize on methodologies or they ask for instance how can you sample the views of 1200 people in the whole country and claim that they represent the whole country. We run into those questions just about in every country and the different segments of the population and our stakeholders and there is frequent baseless accusations of bias and then frequent challenges of communicating the findings in ways that help stakeholders to utilize the findings and unlike the North American media the European media and even Asian media African news media and civil society generally doesn't have enough capacity in competent use of data and that's one of the things that our capacity building is aimed to tackle going forward and then finally as always there is the big elephant in the room funding. As I have hinted Afro parameter service and related activities have been fortunately supported by a consortium of donors led by Cedar Sweden then USA they've been at some point were banned and some philanthropic foundations but it's also the case that changing donor priorities especially these seven aid agencies have constituted you know these agencies that have constituted our core donors are often unable to or drop out of funding for us because of changes in their government priorities and in general the emphasis on democracy and governance is serious and so to address all of this we're trying to professionalize our resource mobilization staff and hope that we and then our new CEO as I indicated is committed to moving the Afro parameter from as it were hand to mouth to more long-term sustainable financial sustainability so this is where we end and maybe now you get the substance of what Afro parameter can offer from Dr. Aswinka. Thank you. I thank thank you so much Jim and this has been super helpful so what I'm now going to present is just an example of the types of ways that we have used the Afro parameter data to provide some reality check on government and data that governments provide you know Jim has alluded to the fact that it's one thing having infrastructure and other programs up and running that is another thing people's actual experience of it and so the SDGs core cards that we developed are supposed to provide that reality check that when governments report about progress in different areas we have some way of checking to see whether people ordinary people have actually felt the kind of progress that we hope it would and so in general I mean this sustainable development goals meant mainly to help drive they drive us towards a world of better you know living conditions improved incomes and improved livelihoods in general and what the Afro parameter does is to then pull our data together on the experiences of people on the various topics or the various areas that the SDGs tries to touch and develop indicators to provide some reality check on what governments actually report and as Jim noted earlier we do have data that we can track up to 12 of the 17 SDGs and these are the 12 that we are able to track that is now on your screen. Then just to give you a brief description of how the indicators are developed first of all of course governance and democracy is our signature topic Afro parameter started in 1999 that has been our signature topic to date and SDG 16 which is on peace justice and strong institutions is at the core of the Afro parameter project itself and how do we then develop our indicators if you look at each SDG goal there are target indicators and for each of these target indicators what Afro parameter does is to look at our questions and see which of the questions actually speak to the specific target that the SDG is trying to track so for example on SDG 16 the target in all the indicators to significantly reduced all forms of violence related to and death rates everywhere that is a the key indicator under SDG 16 and what we do is to pull from the Afro parameter questions that touch on tolerance for political violence violence against women and children fear of experience of violence and the like and we pull these together to construct an index that tracks you know the progress towards reducing all forms of violence against in the around the globe secondly of course if you look at areas of promoting rule of law so for example in terms of rule of law the the key indicator of course is promoting rule of law at the national international and ensure that there's equal access to justice and in the Afro parameter we do have a lot of indicators that touch on this so experience of crime reporting crime trust in the police trust in the courts and we pull all these indicators together to develop an indicator that tracks that so for each country what we try to do is to make sure that we pull all of these indicators and then develop the questions that are relevant to each indicator in the SDG and develop a measure to track it here are some of the other examples that we track in the Afro parameter apart from the SDG 16 which is at the core of our project we do have questions about poverty and hunger which we capture we have quality of education we have good health and the like and so and the list goes on so for each of these if you read the Afro parameter SDGs on our website you will see the specific indicators of questions from the Afro parameter that we use to track the particular indicator. All right so now I'm going to give you just an example of how the SDG scorecards are developed and I'll put this into perspectives one at a country level and then a continental picture of each of the sustainable development goals so if you look here first of all on the left panel we have I'm giving you an example from Botswana so for no poverty we have what we call the lift poverty index in the Afro parameter which is a combination of people having had access or gone without certain basic necessities food, water, different income, cash income and life and what we do is pull these together and try to track over time and this is a trend over time for Botswana where people who have experienced moderate or high lift poverty actually reduced from about 47 percent to the recent literature into one about 37 percent and so that represents a remarkable reduction a significant reduction and if you look at our sample sizes our margin of error is plus or minus three so whenever a country is able to record a reduction or an improvement by plus or minus three percentage points we consider that a significant change anything less than that is considered not significant and so in the case of Botswana both poverty and then of course zero hunger we've seen a significant reduction and then what we try to do is then to put this in a traffic light indicator system where we have green for when the country has actually made a significant improvement as the change is more than plus or minus three percentage points or when they are just within the margin of error then we use the yellow to mean that there has not been any change there's no deterioration and there's no progress we leave it as yellow and where the country has actually gone backward then we put that as red if a country is actually meeting the x-dg targets as stipulated in the sustainable development goals then that becomes blue and so red is bad yellow is no change green is progress and of course blue is actually meeting the target so if you look at the case of Botswana yes reducing poverty is an improvement zero hunger we have seen no change because it changes not more than plus three percentage point that's why it is yellow in terms of reducing the frequency of going without medical supply or medical care you see here it is a red dot that also tells us that Botswana actually retrogressed on this particular indicator so this gives you a picture of the case of Botswana so if you take each country you will see the detailed analysis on the left panel and then on the right panel we have the traffic light situation here of course now this is the continental view what we're not trying to do is we pull all the countries that we have tracked together and average them across the various indicators and then see what is the performance in each country so for the case of no poverty or ending poverty we see Botswana and Burkina Faso recorded improvements that is in the green we've seen here that Gabon and Ghana made no progress and those two are yellow and then most countries actually retrogressed in this indicator and so we see that by and large in terms of reducing poverty if you look at a continental picture there is a general reduction or at least with this progression across most of the country that we've compared today that must make a point here okay just a clarify point here that these indicators are not meant to compare countries to one another it is only to compare countries against themselves over time so what is the progress of Botswana in terms of poverty reduction between 2015 and date it is not possible to compare Botswana to Togo because the indicator is just showing whether or not the countries have made progress in one direction against itself over time and not necessarily comparing countries across the continent so for no poverty yes there's a general reduction and it comes to zero hunger which we also use our question on hunger we've seen a few countries have greens there are some yellows that shows that there's no significant change and I'm here to we have quite a number of countries that have made have actually retrogressed over the last five years and then of course SDG 5 which is about gender equality in terms of both access to technology and then also financial decision making so the left side is about access to technology and the right side is about you know financial decision making in the household I think the good news if you look at this picture is that overall financial decision making has improved quite a bit over time because we see a number of greens here compared to when you look at access to time use of technology what I want to emphasize in this in this particular case is just to note that when we have half a second some of them are half filled in they have fielding just means that there's a mixed performance and so for example if education improves overall in the country but then the improvements among women is much lower than that of men then we give a half cycle because it is it's not a collective a general improvement there's improvement but then they in terms of demographics there's a differential and so whenever you see a half cycle that is what it means we have multiple indicators and some of the indicators are trending in the opposite direction and that is what leads to have the to us having the half indicator but of course the index is there to guide people's interpretation of course when it comes to decent work and economic growth and also we have two separate indicators and here to buy and large you've seen that as a general retrogression across the the the continent then right so peace and justice this is as a society our signature topic and then of course a topic of interest all over in terms of democracy and the promotion of democracy across the world everybody's worried about the retrogression people talk about democracy and going I mean there's a lot of retrogression in democracy and democratic processes and we can actually see quite a bit here that for most countries when it comes to promoting I mean democratic development and strong democratic institutions from the citizen perspective we have seen a retrogression buy and large in most countries all right so all of this to just give you a a flavor of the kinds of things that the afrobarmatic can do and they work how we can use the data to provide reality check and the main purpose of these sdg scorecards is let's provide a reality check on what governments report and see whether there's consistency and what governments see that they are making progress on and whether or not people are actually feeling it on the ground and I think having both side by side allows us to get to a point where we can see a are we really making progress because as we all know trickle down economics does not just work as smoothly as we would hope and so sometimes there are bottlenecks to how people actually feel some of the implement the intervention that government put in place and so we do have this to provide that reality check so I'll stop here and thank you so much for your attention and we're happy to take your questions thanks very much I see there's already a few questions and I would invite the audience to keep sending questions in as well but I wanted to kick off with with the question of my own as chair so I've been following I know that there's been a series in the Washington Post in the monkey cage section looking at the afrobarometer and and I think you you both have a jointly authored article discussing the results of the the afrobarometer and discussing how we see I think a democratic disappointment gap across the data and I wonder if you could tell us a bit about that and but also I wonder how you see that democratic disappointment gap intersecting with with the current COVID situation do you see it worsening uh what is the latest data suggest so of course the point we try to make in that piece and in many of the pieces we've done on on african aspirations for democratic governance and accountable governance but is to make an extension between uh demand and supply and also to also try to point out how the african story with respect to democratization and preference for democracy may be different from the story imagine from other regions of the world with respect to the desire with respect to the support with respect to the demand for democracy in terms of but we of course present a very broad you know big brush picture of the of the situation there are interesting country variations and we note for instance that um in the latest round of the afro that in around a survey for a country like South Africa as support for democracy had significantly declined and was no more a majority opinion at the same time um you you you think of what's going on in Ethiopia and you look at the latest afro parameter findings on Ethiopia well Ethiopians overwhelmingly support democracy notwithstanding the trauma that the country is going through right now and just to add briefly that in terms of the COVID-19 one way the fortunate thing is we had completed about 16 of the countries before the lockdowns and after the lockdown we went back to the field and Jim alluded to this that we had a COVID-19 module but then the countries if you compare the countries that were before the COVID lockdown and after the COVID lockdown support for democracy and the commitment to democratic norms are indistinguishable it's still at the same level and so we haven't yet seen or at least it was probably it's probably too early to have seen it the next round of the surveys we have the folk of it 19 module again and would have some results to then compare see whether or not there has been any influence but as at this point we don't we haven't seen that the data thanks I have more questions but I will ask the questions from the chat I've been trying to get a couple of the audience members to unmute but it hasn't worked so I'm going to ask a couple of the questions here that are related to maybe more technical questions but I think I think they also touch on some some bigger issues as well so the first question is from Ivan Manike and it says greetings the data are really interesting and I know he has used the data in his work it's a great resource and the question is have you ever had an evaluation of the indicators which are generally subjective with other existing more objective indicators what thoughts do you have on that for example a comparison between the lived poverty index and other existing poverty measures I should have an answer to this but I don't I know we've done some with on the political findings we've done comparisons with the freedom house and and other findings on the and then you know it's because our data sometimes sits side by side with the Moibra him indexes governance indexes indicators on some of those issues there are there are there are discrepancies but my view is that on my but in my personal position is that you know data is not you know truth it's a very complicated matter and so it you approach truth from a variety of angles so if government says we have as you know we spend so much on education or on health and citizens say well we we still didn't get medical care when we need that one or you know a segment of a population says so that is their their reality and it's got to be matched against against what other people say I think the value and the importance of the aftermath lies in the fact that we do have overtime data on the same set of indicators so if somebody said I went without food many times in the previous year in round six and then in round seven the person says a few times that represents an objective improvement in that person's situation regardless of what government statistics or where bank or anybody's statistics say so there is a sense in which the alphabet data can be accepted on its own terms provided it meets the technical quality of the criterion of scientific and objective tracking or study of things and just to add briefly to that I think this example of situations where you would see a massive supply of say electricity in a country and so there's a lot of connectivity visually but then if you look at how much electricity or how long people actually access electricity the quality of the electricity supply and stability of it is nonexistent and so if you want to take the objective measure of the supply of electricity and just looking at how much the distribution looks like on the ground and not taking into account how people actually experience the supply of electricity then you're missing something so you have the objective measure of we've covered 90 percent of the country with supply but how much of it is actually translated into something that people benefit from and that's a gap that AfroBramida actually feels and so you may compare the objective and the subjective assessments and you see a big gap but the big gap is just because people don't experience it the way you see it objectively on the ground. There's another couple of questions here from Rukiato Nikyema I'll just ask one of them given the time which speaks a bit to the what we've been talking about and she asks why don't you consider including other quantitative data for example data on revenue or consumption. So I wonder well if you could speak to that but also perhaps maybe bring in some of the other research that's been done using the AfroBramida data that that might you know bring together that I know brings together different types of data. Joseph I hope you can take up the first question because you were an economist before you became a political scientist. My economics didn't go beyond high school. Right, Rajal can you repeat that I think I lost you briefly. Yeah so it's a question asking about other types of data and you know wondering if you could bring in for instance data on revenue or on consumption in the AfroBramida but I wonder if you could also maybe speak more broadly to using the AfroBramida along with other types of data to examine other questions. Right and I think quite a number of people have done that by pulling together data from other sources and then using the AfroBramida as a complement or supplement to do type those kinds of analysis. So what it is in terms of revenues, government spending, budgets and budget openness because for example we have asked questions from time to time about people's access to local budgets and then how do you use that as and draw on data like say the you know the world's surveys on budget openness or the budget openness index in different countries and so we can look at some kinds of transparency measures and of course Jim alluded to this where it's a freedom house or other and transparency. I think it always brings a richness to the analysis that you're providing some analysis that pulls on both the AfroBramida that provide this subjective assessments and sometimes clearly objective assessments of people's experiences. These are the data that exists somewhere that could be used to inform whether it is policy or even an academic piece that you're writing. I think that combination has been done several times. Several people have done that and it's not it's not impossible to do. We have done that in several of our publications as well. There's moving in another direction. There's a another question here from James that speaks to sort of it's a more challenging question about the ideological leanings of the Afro Barometer. So he asks Professor Jim appraises countries that have used the the data to make pro LGBTQ laws while criticizing those who've used the Afro Barometer surveys to legislate against LGBTQ. Does this do such descriptions and positions create more suspicion about the real intentions of the Afro Barometer? So I wonder if you could speak about that and you know maybe bring in some of your experiences with with reactions perhaps from different countries to the the results and the the framing of the the questions. So these are two there are two separate questions here and both of them are really compelling questions. The first one is um there's the Afro Barometer have an ideological bias. Well I believe we do. I believe we do in the sense that of course we share values that are principles that are contained in the UN declaration of UN declarations and other commitments that the whole world is taking even if not in compliance. So yes there is there is some ideological bias. I mean we do this survey we ask so many a lot of questions in some at least a couple of occasions or maybe at least one occasion we ask people whether they thought whether it was okay for a man to beat his wife or to beat his spouse. Well the responses may well be in some places we get women majority support for white beating. I do not shy away from describing this as primitive. It's ideological bias but I'd rather be more honest about it than to beat about it you know just sit on the fence on that. So again on LGBT issues I agreed that I was speaking in my activist mode because I'm in Ghana currently there is a region debate because there's a parliamentary there's a bill before parliament which carries provisions such as imprisoning LGBTQs on some big criteria given double their sentence to those who advocate or support or try to defend them and even more punishment for knowing and not reporting knowing about somebody so I cannot you know it's hard for me to find a better vocabulary but I understand this on this occasion I was in my activist mode I normally talk more diplomatically than that but this is a situation where I just could not master my normal discipline about these things so James sorry about that but I also want to be honest about it and and then on the democracy and democratic governance questions so we challenge ourselves we ask ourselves constantly do people really mean and understand it when they say they support democracy and one of the ways we tested this is to ask the question by the meaning of democracy in different ways and to put it put a question in the form of bignets so we give people a choice in country a left you know leaders are choosing periodically through elections you chair is independent from the executive laws are made by parliament versus then country b which one is democratic and the majority of Africans 70 percent in the last the last time we checked defined democracy correctly meaning that there is some basic understanding of democracy as essentially a political governance idea then we've also been tracking we've been asking people this binary question a government that is accountable even if it is slow or not so great on the delivery side versus a government that is strong on the delivery side but not accountable and increasingly we get majorities voting for accountable even if not so effective government when we started asking that question the average the african average was about 52 percent the last time we asked the question last in round eight it was 62 percent a 10 percentage increase in about 10 years that seems to me to confirm the story and the picture we are picking up of growing and hardening commitment to democratic governance ideals as opposed to the other way Joe would you like to come in as well right i think jima has covered it now effectively in this particular case so and as jima mentioned yes we are both in this activist mode and our activism gets in the way but certainly as researchers we do speak to the data and we speak to our results without being emotionally charged but it's the particular time of the year that we are so excited about the situation that is so hard to resist so james again sorry well i um unfortunately our time is is coming to an end so i need to close the conversation but i think it's a nice place to end with a with a challenging question and a good response a good defense um so uh you know the afroperometer has really been it is a great resource for research but i i think as you've shown shown really well for us today also for policy both for for country governments but also for for international organizations um for those not familiar with it please look it up and uh the rest of us will just we'll keep working with your with your data and um it's it's nice also to learn more about the sdg scorecards which i think had a really interesting dimension to the discussion about progress toward the sdgs toward meeting the sdgs so thank you gentlemen um thank you much appreciated for joining us today right thank you all and of course on behalf of the afrobarometer i really want to extend our appreciation and the opportunity given us to to share this with us and we are always happy to respond to any queries or common questions that people will have or even how to access and use our data we we are people who can support that so please feel free to reach out if you need to great bye bye bye thank you everyone bye then thank you so much