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.

Climate-Related Risk Modeling of Banana Xanthomonas Wilt Disease Incidence in the Cropland Area of Rwanda.

Banana Xanthomonas wilt (BXW) is a major threat to banana production in Rwanda, causing up to 100% yield loss. There are no biological or chemical control measures, and little is known about the potential direction and magnitude of its spread; hence, cultural control efforts are reactive rather than proactive. In this study, we assessed BXW risk under current and projected climates to guide early warning and control by applying the maximum entropy (Maxent) model on 1,022 georeferenced BXW datapoints and 20 environmental variables.

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.