electricsheepafrica/africa-fewsnet-staple-food-price-data-for-zimbabwe-monthly-131

Monthly FEWS NET Staple Food Price Data for Zimbabwe

Publisher: FEWS NET · Source: HDX · License: cc-by · Updated: 2026-03-30

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Abstract

Zimbabwe Monthly staple food price data collected by FEWS NET since 2004.

Each row in this dataset represents country-level aggregates. Temporal coverage is indicated by the period_date column(s). Geographic scope: ZWE.

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)	4,878
Columns	17 (3 numeric, 13 categorical, 1 datetime)
Train split	3,902 rows
Test split	975 rows
Geographic scope	ZWE
Publisher	FEWS NET
HDX last updated	2026-03-30

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Variables

Geographic — country (Zimbabwe), admin_1 (Harare, Bulawayo, Midlands), longitude (range 28.5734–32.6556), latitude (range -20.1471–-17.868), price_type (Retail) and 2 others.

Temporal — period_date.

Outcome / Measurement — value (range 0.0005–1849.0).

Identifier / Metadata — source_document (Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), Zimbabwe, Price (ZWL), Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), Zimbabwe, Price (USD)), product_source (Local, Import), esa_source, esa_processed.

Other — market (Harare, Mbare, Bulawayo, Renkini, Gweru, Kombayi), cpcv2 (P33360AA, P33310AA, P23490AA), product (Diesel, Gasoline, Bread), unit (L, kg, 700_g).

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Quick Start

from datasets import load_dataset

ds    = load_dataset("electricsheepafrica/africa-fewsnet-staple-food-price-data-for-zimbabwe-monthly-131")
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	object	0.0%	Zimbabwe
market	object	0.0%	Harare, Mbare, Bulawayo, Renkini, Gweru, Kombayi
admin_1	object	0.0%	Harare, Bulawayo, Midlands
longitude	float64	0.0%	28.5734 – 32.6556 (mean 30.7957)
latitude	float64	0.0%	-20.1471 – -17.868 (mean -18.6158)
cpcv2	object	0.0%	P33360AA, P33310AA, P23490AA
product	object	0.0%	Diesel, Gasoline, Bread
source_document	object	0.0%	Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), Zimbabwe, Price (ZWL), Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), Zimbabwe, Price (USD)
period_date	datetime64[ns]	0.0%
price_type	object	0.0%	Retail
product_source	object	0.0%	Local, Import
unit	object	0.0%	L, kg, 700_g
unit_type	object	0.0%	Volume, Weight, Item
currency	object	0.0%
value	float64	9.1%	0.0005 – 1849.0 (mean 17.8414)
esa_source	object	0.0%
esa_processed	object	0.0%

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Numeric Summary

Column	Min	Max	Mean	Median
longitude	28.5734	32.6556	30.7957	31.0312
latitude	-20.1471	-17.868	-18.6158	-17.868
value	0.0005	1849.0	17.8414	1.34

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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 FEWS NET 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_fewsnet_staple_food_price_data_for_zimbabwe_monthly_131,
  title     = {Monthly FEWS NET Staple Food Price Data for Zimbabwe},
  author    = {FEWS NET},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://data.humdata.org/dataset/fewsnet_staple_food_price_data_for_zimbabwe_monthly_131},
  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.