electricsheepafrica/africa-faostat-food-prices-for-eswatini

---
annotations_creators:
- no-annotation
language_creators:
- found
language:
- en
license: cc-by-4.0
multilinguality:
- monolingual
size_categories:
- n<1K
source_datasets:
- original
task_categories:
- tabular-regression
task_ids: []
tags:
- africa
- humanitarian
- hdx
- electric-sheep-africa
- food-security
- indicators
- swz
pretty_name: "Eswatini - Food Prices"
dataset_info:
splits:
- name: train
num_examples: 724
- name: test
num_examples: 181
---

# Eswatini - Food Prices

**Publisher:** Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations · **Source:** [HDX](https://data.humdata.org/dataset/faostat-food-prices-for-eswatini) · **License:** `cc-by-igo` · **Updated:** 2026-04-06

---

## Abstract

Food Prices for Eswatini.

Contains data from the FAOSTAT [bulk data service](https://fenixservices.fao.org/faostat/static/bulkdownloads/datasets_E.json) covering the following categories: Consumer Price Indices, Deflators, Exchange rates

Each row in this dataset represents country-level aggregates. Temporal coverage is indicated by the `startdate`, `enddate` column(s). Geographic scope: **SWZ**.

*Curated into ML-ready Parquet format by [Electric Sheep Africa](https://huggingface.co/electricsheepafrica).*

---

## Dataset Characteristics

| | |
|---|---|
| **Domain** | Food security and nutrition |
| **Unit of observation** | Country-level aggregates |
| **Rows (total)** | 906 |
| **Columns** | 20 (7 numeric, 11 categorical, 2 datetime) |
| **Train split** | 724 rows |
| **Test split** | 181 rows |
| **Geographic scope** | SWZ |
| **Publisher** | Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations |
| **HDX last updated** | 2026-04-06 |

---

## Variables

**Geographic** — `iso3` (SWZ), `year_code` (range 2000.0–2025.0), `year` (range 2000.0–2025.0).

**Temporal** — `startdate`, `enddate`, `months_code` (range 7001.0–7012.0), `months` (January, February, March).

**Outcome / Measurement** — `value` (range -8.4728–180.6673).

**Identifier / Metadata** — `area_code` (range 209.0–209.0), `area_code_m49` ('748), `item_code` (range 23012.0–23014.0), `element_code` (range 6121.0–6125.0), `esa_source` (HDX) and 1 others.

**Other** — `area` (Eswatini), `item` (Consumer Prices, Food Indices (2015 = 100), Consumer Prices, General Indices (2015 = 100), Food price inflation), `element` (Value), `unit` (%), `flag` (X, E, I) and 1 others.

---

## Quick Start

```python
from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("electricsheepafrica/africa-faostat-food-prices-for-eswatini")
train = ds["train"].to_pandas()
test = ds["test"].to_pandas()

print(train.shape)
train.head()
```

---

## Schema

| Column | Type | Null % | Range / Sample Values |
|---|---|---|---|
| `iso3` | object | 0.0% | SWZ |
| `startdate` | datetime64[ns] | 0.0% | |
| `enddate` | datetime64[ns] | 0.0% | |
| `area_code` | int64 | 0.0% | 209.0 – 209.0 (mean 209.0) |
| `area_code_m49` | object | 0.0% | '748 |
| `area` | object | 0.0% | Eswatini |
| `item_code` | int64 | 0.0% | 23012.0 – 23014.0 (mean 23012.9868) |
| `item` | object | 0.0% | Consumer Prices, Food Indices (2015 = 100), Consumer Prices, General Indices (2015 = 100), Food price inflation |
| `element_code` | int64 | 0.0% | 6121.0 – 6125.0 (mean 6123.702) |
| `element` | object | 0.0% | Value |
| `months_code` | int64 | 0.0% | 7001.0 – 7012.0 (mean 7006.4404) |
| `months` | object | 0.0% | January, February, March |
| `year_code` | int64 | 0.0% | 2000.0 – 2025.0 (mean 2012.4172) |
| `year` | int64 | 0.0% | 2000.0 – 2025.0 (mean 2012.4172) |
| `unit` | object | 67.5% | % |
| `value` | float64 | 0.0% | -8.4728 – 180.6673 (mean 63.5677) |
| `flag` | object | 0.0% | X, E, I |
| `note` | object | 32.5% | base year is 2015 |
| `esa_source` | object | 0.0% | HDX |
| `esa_processed` | object | 0.0% | |

---

## Numeric Summary

| Column | Min | Max | Mean | Median |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| `area_code` | 209.0 | 209.0 | 209.0 | 209.0 |
| `item_code` | 23012.0 | 23014.0 | 23012.9868 | 23013.0 |
| `element_code` | 6121.0 | 6125.0 | 6123.702 | 6125.0 |
| `months_code` | 7001.0 | 7012.0 | 7006.4404 | 7006.0 |
| `year_code` | 2000.0 | 2025.0 | 2012.4172 | 2012.0 |
| `year` | 2000.0 | 2025.0 | 2012.4172 | 2012.0 |
| `value` | -8.4728 | 180.6673 | 63.5677 | 52.4246 |

---

## Curation

Raw data was downloaded from HDX via the CKAN API and converted to Parquet. Column names were lowercased and standardised to snake_case. Common missing-value markers (`N/A`, `null`, `none`, `-`, `unknown`, `no data`, `#N/A`) were unified to `NaN`. 2 column(s) were cast from string to numeric or datetime based on parse-success rate (>85% threshold). The dataset was split 80/20 into train and test partitions using a fixed random seed (42) and saved as Snappy-compressed Parquet.

---

## Limitations

- Data originates from Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations and has not been independently validated by ESA.
- Automated cleaning cannot correct for misreported values, definitional inconsistencies, or sampling bias in the original collection.
- The following columns have >20% missing values and should be treated with caution in modelling: `unit`, `note`.
- Refer to the [original HDX dataset page](https://data.humdata.org/dataset/faostat-food-prices-for-eswatini) for the publisher's own methodology notes and caveats.

---

## Citation

```bibtex
@dataset{hdx_africa_faostat_food_prices_for_eswatini,
title = {Eswatini - Food Prices},
author = {Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations},
year = {2026},
url = {https://data.humdata.org/dataset/faostat-food-prices-for-eswatini},
note = {Repackaged for machine learning by Electric Sheep Africa (https://huggingface.co/electricsheepafrica)}
}
```

---

*[Electric Sheep Africa](https://huggingface.co/electricsheepafrica) — Africa's ML dataset infrastructure. Lagos, Nigeria.*