By Babajide Komolafe

The newly introduced Standard Chartered-Premise Consumer Price Tracker (SC-PCT) has revealed a downward trend in consumer prices between August and September.

The Price Tracker, which was developed by Standard Chartered Bank and Premise Corporation, revealed that the downward trend in prices was driven by price declines in the ‘grains and flours’ category.

The aim of the SC-PCT, according to Razia Khan is to obtaining more accurate price information for a few staples, and can be used as a guide to the monthly consumer price index (CPI) of the National Bureau of Statistics.

Speaking at a press conference to unveil the Price Tracker, the Head of Regional Research, Africa, and Standard Chartered said, “We have partnered with the Premise data corporation to provide more accurate, real- time price information.

The effort will initially be focused on Nigeria, concentrating on the more populous centres of Lagos and Kano (alongside a few Abuja-based observations). We plan to roll this out to other African economies over time.

“More than 350 people are engaged in capturing price information on their smartphones, taking photographs of food staples and their price tags and uploading them to a central database.

Where price tags are not on display, information on prices is entered manually. Each week, price information on c.21,000 data items is captured in this way. Geo-tracking provides location information.

Participants are paid through top-up mobile phone credits. This allows for real-time collation and understanding of price trends and their geographic dispersion, much sooner than it is likely to be available from any other source.

“This is not an attempt to create a new Nigerian CPI.

The exercise is a grassroots data collection effort that allows us to engage better with local communities.