USIU-Africa hosts a three- day research workshop dubbed Afrobarometer week
Recently, the Department of International Relations (IR) hosted a 3-day research workshop and training event dubbed ‘Afrobarometer week’ in collaboration with Afrobarometer, an independent pan-African research network that provides data on African citizens’ values, evaluations, and experiences.
It included a series of events and meetings aimed at introducing Afrobarometer’s rich treasure trove of data, as well as its unique research analysis tools, to the USIU-Africa community comprising of faculty, staff and students.
The research training was organized in collaboration with the Department of International Relations in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences and the School of Graduate Studies, Research and Extension.
The key objectives of the maiden event were to:
- Create wider awareness among USIU-Africa’s faculty and students about Afrobarometer data and analysis as a resource to support their work;
- Ignite interest among both faculty and/or postgraduate students in utilizing Afrobarometer data for new or ongoing teaching and research;
- Introduce users to the Afrobarometer Online Data Analysis facility as one key tool for using our data;
- Assess interest at USIU-Africa in building additional faculty and/or student skills in research methods and analysis based on using Afrobarometer data or similar data sources;
- Discuss with USIU-Africa the opportunities for building an ongoing collaboration to facilitate teaching and research using Afrobarometer data.
During the three-day event, the Afrobarometer team drawn from South Africa, Malawi and Michigan State University in the United States, interacted and trained a host of Undergraduate, Masters and Doctorate students on how to access and apply Afrobarometer’s public data for research and academic writing. In particular, the PhD students from the Department of International Relations, were taken through personalized training on how to access and apply data from the Afrobarometer online data analysis platform.
The Afrobarometer team wishes to appreciate the faculty and students for committing their time during the three-day training.
The Afrobarometer week was an initiative led by Dr. Mercy Kaburu who is a lecturer in the Department of International Relations at USIU-Africa and currently a fellow with Alliance for African Partnership-African Future’s Program at Michigan State University (MSU).
