Public Perceptions of Government Policies to Covid-19: A Comparative Study in Six African Countries

The outbreak of COVID-19 has impacted countries across the world, including those in Africa. Governments in these countries have implemented various policies to curb the spread of the virus. However, the effectiveness of these policies largely depends on how they are perceived by the public. This study aims to investigate public perceptions of government policies to COVID-19 in six African countries by conducting a sentiment analysis of tweets.Using Python, we will collect tweets related to COVID-19 and government policies from Twitter's API from 07 March 2020 to 02 February 2022. We performed pre-processing steps such as tokenization, stemming, and stop-word removal to clean the data. Next, we used Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to classify the sentiment of each tweet as positive, negative, or neutral.The six African countries selected for this study are Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Rwanda and Uganda. We collected 134,494 tweets on Twitter accounts. We evaluated policies by countries in three categories, while some were too strict policies, others were strict or relaxed.The findings of this study will provide valuable insights into how different government policies are perceived by the public in these African countries. This information can be used to inform policymakers and public health officials on how to improve their messaging and policies to effectively combat the spread of COVID-19. Data showed heterogeneous reactions with negative perceptions For instance, earlier face mask and lockdown policies were implemented and vaccination policies later.