The Sub-Saharan Security Tracker

The Council on Foreign Relations’ Africa Program has just “soft-launched” a new online tool we call the Sub-Saharan Security Tracker (SST). We anticipate a roundtable at the Council’s New York and Washington offices to introduce formally the SST. In the meantime, it is available for use.

Like the Nigeria Security Tracker, the SST tracks incidents of political violence. The purpose of the SST is to show the trends in political violence across all of sub-Saharan Africa.

The SST uses data provided by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) Project to map over three million data points. It allows the user to determine the geographic distribution of violence as well as trends over time, and the actors involved in political violence. The SST is updated monthly. The SST’s map and graphs represent information based on the number of deaths. However, the map also allows the user to see the number of reported incidents of violence in each country.

The countries where the numbers of deaths attributed to political violence are the greatest are Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Central African Republic. Nigeria has seen by far the most deaths attributed to political violence (over 34,000). However, Somalia has had more than double Nigeria’s number of incidents of political violence (approximately 12,800 to 6,100).

Sub-Saharan Africa is made up of forty-eight countries and is home to approximately one billion people. It does not include Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia. The data used in the SST begins June 1, 2011.

To find out more about the Sub-Saharan Security Tracker you can visit: www.cfr.org/african_security_tracker.