electricsheepafrica/africa-world-bank-agriculture-and-rural-development-indicators-for-malawi

Malawi - Agriculture and Rural Development

Publisher: World Bank Group · Source: HDX · License: cc-by · Updated: 2026-03-27

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Abstract

Contains data from the World Bank's data portal. There is also a consolidated country dataset on HDX.

For the 70 percent of the world's poor who live in rural areas, agriculture is the main source of income and employment. But depletion and degradation of land and water pose serious challenges to producing enough food and other agricultural products to sustain livelihoods here and meet the needs of urban populations. Data presented here include measures of agricultural inputs, outputs, and productivity compiled by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization.

Each row in this dataset represents country-level aggregates. Data was last updated on HDX on 2026-03-27. 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	Country-level aggregates
Rows (total)	1,675
Columns	8 (2 numeric, 6 categorical, 0 datetime)
Train split	1,340 rows
Test split	335 rows
Geographic scope	MWI
Publisher	World Bank Group
HDX last updated	2026-03-27

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Variables

Geographic — country_name (Malawi), country_iso3 (MWI), year (range 1960.0–2025.0).

Outcome / Measurement — value (range -1.6255–3858008634.4524).

Identifier / Metadata — indicator_name (Rural population, Rural population (% of total population), Rural population growth (annual %)), indicator_code (SP.RUR.TOTL, SP.RUR.TOTL.ZS, SP.RUR.TOTL.ZG), esa_source (HDX), esa_processed (2026-04-14).

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Quick Start

from datasets import load_dataset

ds    = load_dataset("electricsheepafrica/africa-world-bank-agriculture-and-rural-development-indicators-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
country_name	object	0.0%	Malawi
country_iso3	object	0.0%	MWI
year	int64	0.0%	1960.0 – 2025.0 (mean 1995.046)
indicator_name	object	0.0%	Rural population, Rural population (% of total population), Rural population growth (annual %)
indicator_code	object	0.0%	SP.RUR.TOTL, SP.RUR.TOTL.ZS, SP.RUR.TOTL.ZG
value	float64	0.0%	-1.6255 – 3858008634.4524 (mean 40907757.179)
esa_source	object	0.0%	HDX
esa_processed	object	0.0%	2026-04-14

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Numeric Summary

Column	Min	Max	Mean	Median
year	1960.0	2025.0	1995.046	1997.0
value	-1.6255	3858008634.4524	40907757.179	73.1179

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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. 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 World Bank Group 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_world_bank_agriculture_and_rural_development_indicators_for_malawi,
  title     = {Malawi - Agriculture and Rural Development},
  author    = {World Bank Group},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://data.humdata.org/dataset/world-bank-agriculture-and-rural-development-indicators-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.