Covid-19 provides a unique opportunity of a clear inflection point that was experienced (more-or-less) in parallel across the African continent, and which impacted multiple key aspects of daily life expecially due to implemented measures such as lockdown of cities.
The main focus of the research is to explore the change in the availability of food due to supply chains being affected, or change in the price of food and resulting hunger /food poverty/food insecurity.
Using Nairobi , Accra , Johanesburg and Lagos as sample cities , the exploration gathers tweets from these cities , cleans them up and in a bid to identify and / or locate patterns in the discussions around food availability.
Additionally , identifying the kind of agents were behind these discussions , how they differ in kind of sentiment (positive or negative) and quantity of reaction generated
Using the Twitter API as the main source for data , a list of keywords are used to search for tweets using a radius of 200 kilometres of the named cities.
The distribution of tweets across the different stages ( before , during and after ) the declaration of a lockdown.
