Food Market Price & Supply Chain Dataset
15 years of weekly wholesale and retail price observations for staple foods across 5 African markets — linked to seasonal rainfall, fuel price indices, and transport cost proxies for food-security forecasting and supply-chain optimisation AI.
This is a synthetic dataset generated from high-quality expert-labelled seed data. All records are algorithmically derived — statistical distributions, inter-field correlations, and annotation characteristics faithfully replicate real-world patterns from the source data, while ensuring no real individual, organisation, or transaction can be identified or reconstructed.
The African Food Market Price & Supply Chain Dataset aggregates 15 years of price monitoring data from wholesale and retail markets in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Senegal — five of the continent's most strategically important food economies. Each record captures the observed price of a specific commodity at a named market on a given date, alongside matched context variables: seasonal rainfall anomaly, national fuel price index, and a transport-cost proxy derived from road-condition and distance data.
Commodities covered include the core staple basket: maize, rice, sorghum, millet, cassava flour, yam, beans, soybean, wheat flour, and palm oil — 10 commodities × 5 countries × roughly 780 weekly observations per series, yielding a dense multi-market panel. Price data are sourced from national food-price monitoring systems (WFP VAM, FEWS NET, national statistics bureaux) and harmonised to USD-per-kg equivalents using contemporaneous exchange rates. Missing weeks are flagged with an imputation method code rather than interpolated silently.
The dataset is designed for time-series forecasting, causal inference (impact of fuel shocks on food prices), and spatial price-transmission modelling. It is structured as a long-format panel compatible with standard econometric and ML time-series libraries (statsmodels, Prophet, Darts, NeuralForecast). A companion GeoJSON file maps market locations for spatial interpolation tasks.
Key Use Cases
Dataset Highlights
Geographic Coverage
Dataset Schema
Each record is one price observation for a commodity at a specific market on a specific date, enriched with matched contextual variables and data quality flags.
| Field Name | Type | Description | Nullable | Example |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| observation_id | STRING | Unique observation identifier | No | OBS-NGA-LG-20230814-MAIZE |
| country_code | STRING | ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code | No | NG |
| market_name | STRING | Name of the monitored wholesale or retail market | No | Mile 12 Lagos |
| market_type | ENUM | Market level: WHOLESALE, RETAIL | No | WHOLESALE |
| observation_date | DATE | Date of price observation (YYYY-MM-DD) | No | 2023-08-14 |
| commodity | ENUM | Commodity: MAIZE, RICE, SORGHUM, MILLET, CASSAVA_FLOUR, YAM, BEANS, SOYBEAN, WHEAT_FLOUR, PALM_OIL | No | MAIZE |
| price_usd_kg | FLOAT | Observed price in USD per kilogram | No | 0.38 |
| price_local_unit | FLOAT | Price in local currency per standard local unit | Yes | 350 |
| local_currency | STRING | ISO 4217 currency code of local price | Yes | NGN |
| rainfall_anomaly_pct | FLOAT | Seasonal rainfall anomaly vs 10-year average (%) | Yes | -18.4 |
| fuel_price_index | FLOAT | National fuel price index (base 100 = Jan 2020) | Yes | 142.7 |
| transport_cost_proxy | FLOAT | Estimated transport cost from nearest surplus zone (USD/tonne-km) | Yes | 0.12 |
| data_source | ENUM | Price monitoring source: WFP_VAM, FEWS_NET, NATIONAL_STAT, FIELD_SURVEY | No | WFP_VAM |
| imputation_flag | ENUM | Data quality: OBSERVED, INTERPOLATED, IMPUTED_MEAN, MISSING | No | OBSERVED |
| price_shock_flag | BOOLEAN | True if price deviates > 2 SD from 4-week rolling average | No | false |
Sample Records
Four representative price observations spanning countries, commodities, and data-quality conditions.
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