electricsheepafrica/africa-wfp-food-prices-for-malawi

Malawi - Food Prices

Publisher: WFP - World Food Programme · Source: HDX · License: cc-by-igo · Updated: 2026-04-05

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Abstract

This dataset contains Food Prices data for Malawi, sourced from the World Food Programme Price Database. The World Food Programme Price Database covers foods such as maize, rice, beans, fish, and sugar for 98 countries and some 3000 markets. It is updated weekly but contains to a large extent monthly data. The data goes back as far as 1992 for a few countries, although many countries started reporting from 2003 or thereafter.

Each row in this dataset represents subnational administrative unit observations. Temporal coverage is indicated by the date column(s). Geographic scope: MWI.

Curated into ML-ready Parquet format by Electric Sheep Africa.

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Dataset Characteristics

Domain	Food security and nutrition
Unit of observation	Subnational administrative unit observations
Rows (total)	52,360
Columns	18 (6 numeric, 11 categorical, 1 datetime)
Train split	41,888 rows
Test split	10,472 rows
Geographic scope	MWI
Publisher	WFP - World Food Programme
HDX last updated	2026-04-05

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Variables

Geographic — admin1 (Southern Region, Central Region, Northern Region), admin2 (Machinga, Nsanje, Dowa), latitude (range -17.12–-9.57), longitude (range 32.9–35.87), category (cereals and tubers, pulses and nuts, non-food) and 4 others.

Temporal — date.

Outcome / Measurement — priceflag (aggregate, actual, actual,aggregate), price (range 1.22–330000.0), usdprice (range 0.0087–319.66).

Identifier / Metadata — market_id (range 763.0–9645.0), esa_source (HDX), esa_processed.

Other — market (Marka, Lunzu, Karonga Boma), unit (KG, Heap, Unit).

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Quick Start

from datasets import load_dataset

ds    = load_dataset("electricsheepafrica/africa-wfp-food-prices-for-malawi")
train = ds["train"].to_pandas()
test  = ds["test"].to_pandas()

print(train.shape)
train.head()

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Schema

Column	Type	Null %	Range / Sample Values
date	datetime64[ns]	0.0%
admin1	object	0.5%	Southern Region, Central Region, Northern Region
admin2	object	0.5%	Machinga, Nsanje, Dowa
market	object	0.0%	Marka, Lunzu, Karonga Boma
market_id	int64	0.0%	763.0 – 9645.0 (mean 1615.3732)
latitude	float64	0.5%	-17.12 – -9.57 (mean -14.3481)
longitude	float64	0.5%	32.9 – 35.87 (mean 34.6113)
category	object	0.0%	cereals and tubers, pulses and nuts, non-food
commodity	object	0.0%	Maize, Beans, Rice
commodity_id	int64	0.0%	50.0 – 1335.0 (mean 453.224)
unit	object	0.0%	KG, Heap, Unit
priceflag	object	0.0%	aggregate, actual, actual,aggregate
pricetype	object	0.0%	Retail
currency	object	0.0%	MWK, SOS
price	float64	0.0%	1.22 – 330000.0 (mean 4584.3513)
usdprice	float64	0.0%	0.0087 – 319.66 (mean 3.1129)
esa_source	object	0.0%	HDX
esa_processed	object	0.0%

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Numeric Summary

Column	Min	Max	Mean	Median
market_id	763.0	9645.0	1615.3732	823.0
latitude	-17.12	-9.57	-14.3481	-14.79
longitude	32.9	35.87	34.6113	34.75
commodity_id	50.0	1335.0	453.224	119.0
price	1.22	330000.0	4584.3513	500.0
usdprice	0.0087	319.66	3.1129	0.59

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Curation

Raw data was downloaded from HDX via the CKAN API and converted to Parquet. Column names were lowercased and standardised to snake_case. Common missing-value markers (N/A, null, none, -, unknown, no data, #N/A) were unified to NaN. 1 column(s) were cast from string to numeric or datetime based on parse-success rate (>85% threshold). The dataset was split 80/20 into train and test partitions using a fixed random seed (42) and saved as Snappy-compressed Parquet.

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Limitations

• Data originates from WFP - World Food Programme and has not been independently validated by ESA.
• Automated cleaning cannot correct for misreported values, definitional inconsistencies, or sampling bias in the original collection.
• Refer to the original HDX dataset page for the publisher's own methodology notes and caveats.

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Citation

@dataset{hdx_africa_wfp_food_prices_for_malawi,
  title     = {Malawi - Food Prices},
  author    = {WFP - World Food Programme},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://data.humdata.org/dataset/wfp-food-prices-for-malawi},
  note      = {Repackaged for machine learning by Electric Sheep Africa (https://huggingface.co/electricsheepafrica)}
}

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Electric Sheep Africa — Africa's ML dataset infrastructure. Lagos, Nigeria.