The African Geopolitical Risk Index: A Daily, Country-Level Measure for Fifty-Four Countries, 1979-2026

I introduce the African Geopolitical Risk Index, the first daily, country-level measure of geopolitical risk built specifically for the African continent. The index covers all fifty-four African countries from 1979 to 2026, and is constructed from the global news-event record rather than from a small panel of Western newspapers. For each country and each day I measure the share of that country's news-event coverage that reports conflict or threat, separating the verbal expression of hostility, which I label threats, from its material realization, which I label acts. The measure is article-weighted, so that episodes commanding wide coverage carry more weight than those mentioned in passing, and it is expressed as a share of total coverage, so that it captures the intensity of conflict in the news rather than the overall volume of news. I normalize each series to a common reference window so that levels are comparable over time and across countries, and I produce the index at four levels of aggregation: a continent-wide headline, a separate series for every country, five regional aggregates, and a threats-versus-acts decomposition. I describe two complementary constructions: a long-history, event-based index drawn from the GDELT Event Database and coded through the CAMEO conflict taxonomy, and a modern, fully multilingual, theme-based index drawn from the GDELT Global Knowledge Graph. This paper documents the data, the screening methodology, the aggregation and normalization, and the full keyword and code lists in the appendix, so that the index is transparent and reproducible.