Since May 2024, our team at WeCollect has been tracking the price of common food items across Nigeria. We wanted to understand how food prices shift over time and space, so instead of trying to cover all 774 LGAs at once, we took a more strategic approach. We grouped local governments based on shared characteristics like urban-rural layout, population density, and building distribution, and selected 20 representative LGAs as a starting point.

For this work, we’ve been using our own mobile data collection tool, WeCollect, which allows us to coordinate and manage field contributors across different parts of the country. These contributors gather price data from grocery stores, traditional markets, and even farms capturing the true range of price points across different communities and market types.

The results have been both insightful and encouraging. We’ve been able to visualize food price shifts on a map, showing spatial disparities across LGAs and how urban centers often record higher prices than surrounding rural communities. These maps, created by integrating our cleaned datasets into QGIS and Leaflet.js, offer a layered view of market access, price volatility, and geographic trends. Visualizations highlight, for instance, how the cost of tomatoes in one rural LGA can be 30% less than in an urban LGA just 40km away insights that can inform public policy and targeted interventions.

This experience not only showcases how open-source mapping tools and mobile data platforms like WeCollect can work together to create usable, community-driven datasets it also underscores the importance of methodology in mapping. We look forward to sharing our technical process, challenges with contributor validation, lessons from our testing of offline tools, and how this data can integrate with OSM layers to support future socioeconomic mapping projects. Ultimately, we believe maps are more than visuals they are tools for collaboration and decision-making. And for Africa’s future, that kind of mapping matters most.