Monitoring Food Prices Using Mobile Technologies through the FENIX Platform

Overall Goals Monitor food situations of food insecure/vulnerable communities Support food insecure communities to help them become more resilient and able to manage risks and vulnerabilities. Strengthen the capacities of vulnerable households and communities to adapt to changing conditions, manage complex risk environments, and cope with shocks they are unable to prevent. Build capacity to strengthen information collection capabilities and management, monitor environmental and socio-economic factors and estimate potential risks.

Why mobile technologies? To strengthen national capacity in collecting agricultural and food security data Food market (and farm-gate) prices is the short-term objective Medium-term plan is to apply the same technology to other indicators, such as spread of pests and diseases (plant and animal diseases) or planting and harvesting dates from the field Longer-term objective is to use mobile technologies for a broad spectrum of food security-related activities, e.g. monitoring and evaluation of key emergency and development indicators at both national and local levels. The expectation is to increase the data collection capacity of the FAO national partners and to reduce the data processing workload, so that geo-referenced data can be made available on a real-time basis.

Why mobile technologies? The most obvious objective is to overcome data management problems of traditional surveys carried out using paper-based collection methods. Mobile technologies will help FAO and FAO-partners reaching critical and/or remote areas, often in greatest need of assistance. The availability of such data will fill important gaps and provide key information for long and short-term decision making and planning FAO envisages two operating modalities: used by national agencies’ officers or other qualified personnel to run rapid surveillance surveys; used in crowdsourcing modalities to obtain large volumes of localized data

Characteristics of the FAO App Built with Open Source technology Includes configuration files for managing code-lists (e.g. markets, commodities, measurement units, etc.) Accurate positioning using GPS (for geo-referenced information). Geocoding and mapping functionalities to locate cities, markets and vendors Possibility to store data on the device locally, where there is no or limited connectivity Embedded metadata information complying with SDMX specifications

Characteristics of the Web Application Based on the FENIX IT platform, entirely open source Receives and displays data transmitted by the app in real-time Interactive selection of data using maps On-the-fly calculations of averages, sums, measurement units conversions Grouping functionalities for price data using markets, commodities, etc. Geocoding and mapping functionalities to filter data Extensible to add more functionalities, perform calculations using specific algorithms and include new pages

How it works The workflow of the app assumes that the operator must collect food commodity prices from a well-defined number of markets. Before starting the data collection, the app allows to set the work environment by a) adding/removing cities, markets and vendors (shops inside a market) through the Survey Management area and b) filtering the list of the commodities from the Template area (this is useful in case the list of commodities included in the app is longer than the ones to be considered for price collection). The location of cities, markets and vendors, can be either done using GPS (accuracy of ± 1m), by entering the coordinates manually or selecting the location from the map. Enter market name and use GPS or the map to store its location Set the work environment Add a new market

How it works During the data collection, the app will automatically recognize city, market and vendor near the current location using GPS. Alternatively these can be selected using the dropdown lists (where GPS signal is weak). At this point, the operator is collecting prices from a specific vendor. The Add Commodity button, allows to collect several commodity prices at once, indicating the name, quantity (e.g. if sold in bags of x kgs), price (of the specified quantity) currency and the variety of the commodity. By pressing Add Commodity again the operator will be able to specify price for another commodity. When all commodities of that specific vendors are recorded, the operator can use the “Submit on Server” button to send directly the data to the database or can save it on the device (and send it later) if internet connection is not available. “Clear Survey” will clear all entries. Enter price and quantity for the varieties you need and press “Next” to send data to the database or “Save” to temporary save your data in the smartphone Select your market and vendor

How it works Data sent via smartphone is stored in a database managed by FENIX, which renders data in real time as maps, tables and charts (accessible at the following address: http://fenixapps2.fao.org/crowddata/) FENIX calculates the daily average of the prices on-the-fly whenever more than one value per commodity/variety is entered for the same day This is the web “end” of the application. The map visualizes the location of the markets and the related vendors. Gray points show markets/vendors with no data for the selected commodity and timeframe. Data is visualized in real-time as soon as data is collected. In addition, aggregations (with harmonization of measurement units) are performed on-the-fly. This is a survey monitoring system to understand how the data collection is progressing, but it is also a system allowing for early analysis of trends and for capturing short and medium term price anomalies and eventually anticipate imminent shocks.

Release of Output Data Data is made available as “public good”, possibly in real-time, downloadable from the website Data is associated to metadata and it is searchable through the FENIX catalogue (available in any FENIX application) Compatible with international metadata standards (e.g. SDMX, DDI, DCMI, ISO19115); possibility to expose data through SDMX registries (under development) Data can be accessed via APIs

Provincial aggregations Food price DB Aggregations Daily or weekly Market prices Provincial aggregations Modeling Other data Different market types: Wholesale Retail Farm gate