Several conflicts are ongoing in West Africa after long process of sociopolitical tensions. Those conflicts shrink the economic growth and discourage potential investors from creating businesses in the region, including countries where conflicts have not yet occurred. This leads then to an increase of poverty and therefore an additional increase of the conflict potential.
Together with our partner Farafina Institute we are planning a project to quantify the sociopolitical risk in the region using unstructured data from social networks and newspapers as proxy for the general mood in the region. We will apply data mining based approaches to quantify the dependency between the time series of the unstructured data and the conflict indicators in the region.
At the end of the project, we will obtain a predictive model for conflict in West Africa, which could help potential investors creating businesses in the region by suitably quantifying their risk and take it into account in their risk management. Furthermore, it could help local governments in enhancing conflict surveillance and control.