A research initiative cataloguing
state visits, phone calls, video conferences & bilateral agreements.
The Leaders' Visits & Agreements Database (LEAD) is a systematic record of high-level diplomatic engagement between countries — every in-person visit, phone call, and video conference conducted by a Head of State or Government, Foreign Minister, or other senior official, and every treaty or memorandum signed during or as a result of those interactions, between 1990 and 2025.
About the project
LEAD documents how states engage with one another at the highest levels of office. Each row in the database records a single contact — an in-person visit, a phone call, or a video conference — between leaders: who participated, where and when, whom they met, what events they attended, and which agreements were signed. The dataset is systematic: every variable follows a coding scheme designed for comparability across countries, contact types, and decades.
The project is being assembled country-by-country. Each release adds one country's outgoing high-level engagements — visits, phone calls, and video conferences — vetted against multiple primary and secondary sources and cross-checked by a second researcher. The accompanying website visualises the accumulated entries on an interactive world map, with filters by dataset, time period, contact type (visit, call, conference), and category of agreement.
Methodology
Each entry passes through five stages of a standardized coding workflow before publication.
Multiple primary and secondary sources are collected for every visit, phone call, and video conference (official statements, press read-outs, news archives, photo agencies, government press releases).
A 59-variable coding sheet captures participants, dates, hosts, contact type (visit, call, conference), multilateral context, public addresses, cultural visits, business meetings, and agreements signed.
Every row is tagged with a five-level confidence rating (Explicit · Implied · Assumed · Guessed · Dubious) reflecting the certainty of the underlying evidence.
A second researcher reviews each entry for consistency, source quality, and category assignment before the dataset is merged into the public release.
As a last step, our findings are cross-checked against the independent Country and Organization Leader Travel (COLT) dataset of the Frederick S. Pardee Institute for International Futures (University of Denver): overlapping records are compared trip by trip, every discrepancy is re-examined against the original sources, and confirmed corrections are folded back into the database before release.
Moyer, Jonathan D., Collin J. Meisel, Austin S. Matthews, Whitney Doran, Andrew Scott, Marianne Hughes, Anjali T. Martin, Alexandra Kurkul, and Kylie McKee. 2024. “Country and Organization Leader Travel (COLT) Codebook.” Version 2.6. Frederick S. Pardee Institute for International Futures, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver, Denver, CO.
Full variable definitions, the coding rules, the five-level confidence scale and the release history are on the Data & Methods page; the accessibility statement is here.
Roadmap
LEAD grows region by region, and a region is published only once it is coded and verified to the same standard.
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Now
Eastern and Western Africa
34 states and 14,848 engagements, 1990–2025, systematically coded and cross-validated against COLT (release 1.6).
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Next
Southern Africa
Starting with South Africa, now in preparation — the next region to join the published map.
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Then
Central and Northern Africa
Records for these regions already exist in the master workbook; they will be published once they are coded and verified to the same standard as the published regions.
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Ongoing
Every release
Titles for signed agreements, leader portraits where free images exist, and corrections from each vetting pass.
Each release is listed with its date, what changed and its DOI on the Releases page.
Researchers
Hosting & supporting organization
The Africa Foundation, based in Ankara, Turkey, is a research and policy organization dedicated to deepening understanding of Africa's political, economic, and diplomatic landscape, and to strengthening the ties between African countries and their international partners. The Foundation produces academic studies, policy analyses, and original datasets, and convenes scholars, practitioners, and decision-makers around questions of African governance, security, development, and international relations.
The Foundation hosts and supports the LEAD project, providing institutional, methodological, and editorial backing for data collection, vetting, and dissemination.
06230 Altındağ / Ankara
Türkiye
Citation
Licence & reuse
The LEAD dataset is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).
- You may copy, redistribute, adapt and build upon the data, for any purpose, including commercially.
- You must give appropriate credit by citing the reference above, indicate whether you made changes, and not imply that the Africa Foundation endorses your use.
- What it covers: the coded dataset and the figures derived from it. The Africa Foundation's name and logo, and this site's written text, design and source code, are © 2026 Africa Foundation, all rights reserved.