ArketData deploys AI-powered food price intelligence to support smarter decisions for businesses, households and policymakers

Amidst Nigeria's ongoing struggle with food price volatility and increasing household expenses, a new platform called ArketData is stepping in to provide crucial intelligence. This Nigerian food price intelligence platform utilizes AI to offer verified, timely market information, empowering businesses, households, and policymakers to make more informed decisions regarding food security interventions.

Accessible via its website, ArketData delivers real-time market insights across 24 major markets and 17 states, with nationwide accessibility. Users can track actual commodity costs, compare prices across different locations, and anticipate market shifts before making critical purchasing, procurement, or policy decisions. The platform's data is collected through physical market audits every 48 hours, ensuring prices reflect current realities, including local measurements like 'painter' and 'mudu'.

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ArketData is designed to be the digital leverage that shines a light on that opacity.

For government agencies and policymakers, ArketData's timely intelligence serves as an additional layer of evidence. It aids in understanding regional price movements, identifying unusual price disparities, monitoring market conditions, and designing interventions that are more responsive to on-the-ground situations. International development and humanitarian organizations focused on food security, nutrition, and livelihoods can also leverage this granular market information to enhance situational awareness and refine programs.

Chike Obimma, the founder of ArketData, highlighted the platform's core principles: accuracy, trust, and timeliness. He described the challenge in Nigeria's food economy as one of information asymmetry, where a lack of visibility into prices across different markets limits leverage for buyers and hinders strategic procurement for businesses. "ArketData is designed to be the digital leverage that shines a light on that opacity," Obimma stated, aiming to replace guesswork with data-driven decision-making.

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At the heart of strategic decision making are numbers. We want people to stop guessing. We want them to check the data, make better