electricsheepafrica/africa-freedom-of-association-1789-2021-for-select-countries

---
annotations_creators:
- no-annotation
language_creators:
- found
language:
- en
license: cc-by-4.0
multilinguality:
- monolingual
size_categories:
- 1K<n<10K
source_datasets:
- original
task_categories:
- tabular-regression
task_ids: []
tags:
- africa
- humanitarian
- hdx
- electric-sheep-africa
- civic-space
- freedom-of-assembly
pretty_name: "Freedom of Association (1789 – 2021) for select countries"
dataset_info:
splits:
- name: train
num_examples: 1181
- name: test
num_examples: 295
---

# Freedom of Association (1789 – 2021) for select countries

**Publisher:** The Charter Project · **Source:** [OpenAfrica](https://open.africa/dataset/freedom-of-association-1789-2021-for-select-countries) · **License:** `cc-by` · **Updated:** 2023-04-13

---

## Abstract

The variable Freedom of Association Score denotes the best estimate of the extent to which parties, including opposition parties, are allowed to form and participate in elections, and the extent to which civil society organizations are allowed to form and operate freely.

The variables ranges from 0 to 1 (most free).

Each row in this dataset represents tabular records. Data was last updated on OpenAfrica on 2023-04-13. Geographic scope: **Africa (multiple countries)**.

*Curated into ML-ready Parquet format by [Electric Sheep Africa](https://huggingface.co/electricsheepafrica).*

---

## Dataset Characteristics

| | |
|---|---|
| **Domain** | Humanitarian and development data |
| **Unit of observation** | Tabular records |
| **Rows (total)** | 1,477 |
| **Columns** | 5 (2 numeric, 3 categorical, 0 datetime) |
| **Train split** | 1,181 rows |
| **Test split** | 295 rows |
| **Geographic scope** | Africa (multiple countries) |
| **Publisher** | The Charter Project |
| **OpenAfrica last updated** | 2023-04-13 |

---

## Variables

**Identifier / Metadata** — `unnamed_1` (range 1789.0–2021.0), `unnamed_2` (range 0.026–0.933), `esa_source` (HDX), `esa_processed` (2026-04-27).

**Other** — `freedom_of_association_1789_2021` (Ethiopia, Sudan, Benin).

---

## Quick Start

```python
from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("electricsheepafrica/africa-freedom-of-association-1789-2021-for-select-countries")
train = ds["train"].to_pandas()
test = ds["test"].to_pandas()

print(train.shape)
train.head()
```

---

## Schema

| Column | Type | Null % | Range / Sample Values |
|---|---|---|---|
| `freedom_of_association_1789_2021` | object | 0.1% | Ethiopia, Sudan, Benin |
| `unnamed_1` | float64 | 0.2% | 1789.0 – 2021.0 (mean 1948.6377) |
| `unnamed_2` | float64 | 0.2% | 0.026 – 0.933 (mean 0.3235) |
| `esa_source` | object | 0.0% | HDX |
| `esa_processed` | object | 0.0% | 2026-04-27 |

---

## Numeric Summary

| Column | Min | Max | Mean | Median |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| `unnamed_1` | 1789.0 | 2021.0 | 1948.6377 | 1954.5 |
| `unnamed_2` | 0.026 | 0.933 | 0.3235 | 0.149 |

---

## Curation

Raw data was downloaded from OpenAfrica via the CKAN API and converted to Parquet. Column names were lowercased and standardised to snake_case. Common missing-value markers (`N/A`, `null`, `none`, `-`, `unknown`, `no data`, `#N/A`) were unified to `NaN`. 2 column(s) were cast from string to numeric or datetime based on parse-success rate (>85% threshold). The dataset was split 80/20 into train and test partitions using a fixed random seed (42) and saved as Snappy-compressed Parquet.

---

## Limitations

- Data originates from The Charter Project and has not been independently validated by ESA.
- Automated cleaning cannot correct for misreported values, definitional inconsistencies, or sampling bias in the original collection.
- Refer to the [original HDX dataset page](https://open.africa/dataset/freedom-of-association-1789-2021-for-select-countries) for the publisher's own methodology notes and caveats.

---

## Citation

```bibtex
@dataset{openafrica_africa_freedom_of_association_1789_2021_for_select_countries,
title = {Freedom of Association (1789 – 2021) for select countries},
author = {The Charter Project},
year = {2023},
url = {https://open.africa/dataset/freedom-of-association-1789-2021-for-select-countries},
note = {Repackaged for machine learning by Electric Sheep Africa (https://huggingface.co/electricsheepafrica)}
}
```

---

*[Electric Sheep Africa](https://huggingface.co/electricsheepafrica) — Africa's ML dataset infrastructure. Lagos, Nigeria.*