From mobile crowdsourcing to crowd-trusted food price in Nigeria: statistical pre-processing and post-sampling.

Timely and reliable monitoring of food market prices at high spatial and temporal resolution is essential to understanding market and food security developments and supporting timely policy and decision-making. Mostly, decisions rely on price expectations, which are updated with new information releases. Therefore, increasing the availability and timeliness of price information has become a national and international priority.

Increasing engagement in price crowdsourcing initiatives: Using nudges in Nigeria.

African agriculture is yet to reach its full food production potential. One way of addressing this is a better distribution of market signals to farmers and other market participants, which can help them make better-informed decisions, leading to increased income and capacity for investment. Hence, increasing the availability of market information in Africa is a priority and alternative data sources, and new Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) offer huge potential to complement classic official statistics.

Using crowd-sourced data for real-time monitoring of food prices during the COVID-19 pandemic: Insights from a pilot project in northern Nigeria.

The COVID-19 pandemic and related lockdown measures have disrupted food supply chains globally and caused threats to food security, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet detailed, localized, and timely data on food security threats are rarely available to guide targeted policy interventions. Based on real-time evidence from a pilot project in northern Nigeria, where food insecurity is severe, we illustrate how a digital crowdsourcing platform can provide validated real-time, high frequency, and spatially rich information on the evolution of commodity prices.