By the time Nigeria carried out a Consumer Price Index (CPI) rebasing towards the tail end of February, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), which made the announcement, thought it was long overdue, as it was the United Nations Statistics Division-backed way to measure individual consumption.

This decision by the NBS immediately brought inflation down to 24.48 percent for January, although since then, there have been rises. Now, the stats agency has doubled up on reform efforts with a daily food price tracker launched yesterday.

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Called the Nigeria Food Price Tracking Project, here comes a pilot dashboard which, according to the data-gathering parastatal, is crowd-sourced and lets you check prices for 10 key food items across Nigeria, while also helping the organisation generate more timely, accurate data to support decisions on food security and observe price movement.

After the announcement on the NBS’s socials on Tuesday, 29 April 2025, what seems left undone is for shoppers heading to markets to be onboarded, so that they feel empowered when trying to make a choice concerning where to make their future purchases and for how much.

Twenty-four hours to the launch, the National Bureau of Statistics had posted a poll on X asking: If you could track real-time food prices, which item would you check first?

The main responses, possibly, would come up in a subsequent report released to the public that seeks to further explain buying behaviour. Presently, it is just to get through the pilot stage of initiation.

On the day the Nigeria Food Price Tracking Project launched, expectedly commentaries by Prince Semiu Adeniran, who is the NBS’s Statistician-General of the Federation. We are thrilled to release our first price data compiled through crowd-sourcing.

This initiative represents a major step forward in our efforts to harness the power of technology and innovation to improve the quality and timeliness of our statistical data.

Days to the launch, Mr. Adeniran’s agency had observed that food prices remained a key driver of inflation in the country, as the latest CPI report, last shown for March, highlighted. It revealed trends in the cost of essential food items across the country, where the annual inflation rate rose to 24.23 percent in March from 23.18 percent recorded the month before.

Since the food price tracking project is still pretty much new, the statistics agency has been urging feedback to work better.

In a response, one user on X named Ade had inquired, saying, if it uses crowdsourcing, have you factored in potential manipulation where a large number of [bad-faith] actors could feed in wrong figures to affect the prices?

The agency noted this as a valid concern, first of all and added that the user should be assured that we use a validation script to filter out invalid datasets by applying a threshold-based method to detect and remove outliers.

Only data that meet our defined quality criteria are included in the final dataset used for the dashboard.

Even though the Nigeria Food Price Tracking Project with daily updates is still building itself, it represents the NBS’s Trojan horse to arrest inflationary elements in the aspect of getting accurate values of perishables.

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It is unlike the old method of gathering information for the Consumer Price Index, which is collected from selected markets and super stores around the third week of a month.

Now, the stats agency is sourcing data from a wider pool, like directly from the farmer, from neighbourhood kiosks and bulk & discount stores inclusive.

Ayodele Johnson

Ayodelé is a Lagos-based journalist and the Content and Editorial Coordinator at Meiza. All around the megacity, I am steering diverse lifestyle magazine audiences with ingenious hacks and insights that spur fast, informed decisions in their busy lives.