Nnamdi Mbajekwe

Nnamdi Mbajekwe

Biography

Nnamdi Mbajekwe is a rising senior Political Science student at James Madison University. He is working as an intern at MIT’s Political Science department as part of the 2026 MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP). Nnamdi is working on two projects this summer, one on data from Afrobarometer, a public survey organization that does fieldwork in Africa, and an independent project on how political attitudes inform the financial aid system for college in the United States. Nnamdi has had a lifelong interest in history, politics, and economics. While MSRP is his first research experience, he’s also held leadership positions in two of his home institution’s clubs, studied abroad, and participated in several university-sponsored events related to foreign service & law. After finishing his undergraduate studies, he plans to either pursue a PhD in Political Science or a law degree to accommodate his wide range of interests.

Comparing Methodological Similarities Between Afrobarometer and
Arab Barometer
Nnamdi Mbajekwe¹, Ezra Mendel², Maakwe Cumanzala³, Noah Nathan^4
1Department of Political Science, James Madison University
²Department of International Relations, University of the Witwatersrand
³Afrobarometer
⁴Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Afrobarometer and Arab Barometer are two public survey organizations that conduct extensive fieldwork in Africa and the Arab world, respectively. The two organizations are important to the field of political science, because they help capture the lived experiences of people in places that policies are being developed for and research is being conducted. The Afrobarometer, however, was founded earlier, and often features more rounds of questioning and funding. It is also considered a “gold standard” for mass-scale survey conducting of its kind, and its concept has been applied to other regions of the world. So, while the Arab Barometer might have different interests than the Afrobarometer, it can be important to see if the methodologies are similar, such that a high-quality, standardized process can be applied all around the world. To do this, we analyze the four countries that overlap between the Afrobarometer’s latest publicly available round and Arab Barometer’s corresponding wave, and pair similar questions of shared question categories together. From there, we see if the results for these paired questions are similar enough, or if there are statistically significant discrepancies, which if exist, may suggest differences in methodologies that might need resolving.