What these numbers are, and what they are not.

Every figure originates in the World Food Programme’s market price monitoring for Nigeria, published as open data on the Humanitarian Data Exchange. Enumerators record what an item sells for at a specific market, and each observation carries its market, month, unit and whether it was retail or wholesale.

This site adds no estimates of its own. It reshapes the published record — normalising units, averaging across markets, computing changes — and every figure traces back to rows you can download yourself from the source release. Last retrieved 16 September 2026.

Every observation is stamped the 15th of its month. There is no daily or hourly price here, and a site that showed one from this source would be inventing it. The record currently runs to July 2026.

The newest month also arrives incomplete, because markets report on different schedules. July 2026 presently rests on 2 markets. Treating that as the current national price would be badly misleading, so headline figures and all month-on-month comparisons are anchored to June 2026 — the newest month at least ten markets reported in.

The source quotes whatever measure the trader uses: a 100 kg bag, a 2.7 kg measure, a 400 g tin, thirty pieces, a hundred tubers. Twenty distinct unit spellings appear in the Nigeria series, and comparing them raw is meaningless.

So each observation is reduced to one base unit — a kilogram, a litre, a piece or a tuber — before anything is averaged. Where an item appears in several bases, it reports in the one it is most often sold in, and readings in other bases are held out of that average rather than mixed in. A per-kilo yam price never enters the same mean as a per-tuber one.

Headline prices require at least three reporting markets in the month; charts require at least two. Without those floors the record produces false drama. In July 2026 one market quoted local rice at about ₦815 per kilo while the sixteen markets of the month before averaged ₦1,122 — a 27% “crash” that is really just a change in who filed a report.

This is the limitation to keep in mind. The data set grew out of humanitarian monitoring in the north-east, so Borno and Yobe alone account for 68% of all observations. 14 of Nigeria’s 36 states and the FCT appear at all.

Several that do appear are effectively historical — Lagos has a single market whose readings stop in January 2023. Much of the south-east, south-west and middle belt is absent. A national figure here means “an average of the markets that reported”, which is not the same as an average of Nigeria, and the gap between those two is largest exactly where coverage is thinnest.

Roughly 16 of the 43 items in the record stopped reporting in January 2023 and are hidden by default; they remain browsable, labelled as discontinued, because their history is still worth reading.

Trends over years are this record’s real strength — 295 months of consistent methodology is rare, and the direction and magnitude of change are trustworthy where coverage is steady. Cross-market spreads within a single month are also sound, since those observations were collected the same way.

What it will not support is a claim about today’s price in a state that does not report, or a national inflation figure. For that, pair it with the National Bureau of Statistics releases, which are official and nationwide but coarser in time.