Analyzing Multi-Lingual Discussions of the Standard Gauge Railway Project in Kenya Using Natural Language Processing and Social Media Analysis

Development of infrastructure in Kenya, especially transportation infrastructure, began receiving partial financing investments by the Chinese government in 2014 as part of China’s broader Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). While there has been significant journalistic, academic, and governmental exploration of China’s new global investment strategies, less analysis has focused on local reactions to these new development relationships. In this study, we gather publicly available social media data centered around a large Kenya-Chinese infrastructure project, the Mombasa-Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway (SGR). We used automated natural language processing strategies as well as manual analysis of social media data from Twitter to understand discussion topics, attitudes, and sentiments of Kenyans toward domestic Kenya-China infrastructure projects. We advance research on multilingual digital expression through the analysis of social media data in both English and Swahili.