African goods price

Introduction

The focus of our project concerns the analysis of some food parameters in African countries such as price and scarcity. We decided to take this continent into consideration to visualize the nations where the highest poverty is concentrated. The project is for informational purposes therefore the reference target is very vast, even if there is a greater interest in reaching those people who have a strong will to bring about a change, i.e.: volunteers or wealthier people interested in the works of charity. The goal of the project is to show an overview of the price of food in the various nations of the continent by highlighting the poorest nations in order to achieve global awareness.

Choropleth map with slider and sidebar

1990

↓ Dataset

↓ Visualization protocol

The problem of food distribution

According to an article in an Italian newspaper, there is no global shortage of food, but it is not distributed fairly. The lack of food in Africa does not depend only on the war in Ukraine, but began to manifest itself before this event and the conflict has only accentuated its effects. The problem is that at the moment there is no problem of global food shortage, but of access to food. The increase in prices, the instability of international markets, the strong dependence of some countries on food imports represent a barrier to access to food and, ultimately, this depends on the structural causes of hunger: conflicts, the climate crisis and the inequalities that expose the most vulnerable groups to the devastating effects of economic shocks.

With our visualization we want to show the African countries with the highest food prices so that we can later analyze the reasons and act accordingly. An example of food prices that are too high could be caused by the difficulty of transport, which if improved could guarantee a better quality of life for many people. The purpose of our visualization, accompanied by appropriate analyses, is therefore to select those countries that need immediate action.

Interactive food prices map

Click on a location to see its average price

Overall food prices

We want to highlight the 10 best and worst places in Africa based on the overall average of the prices. In the first graph we can see the countries where market prices are the highest. In these countries the cost of food is really high for the people who live there, this is because the level of poverty is certainly very high and furthermore, as there is a shortage of food, the products will be even more expensive, it could also mean an export/ import of valuable goods.On the other hand, in the second graph, we can see the countries with the lowest price averages.We interpret this as a result of a lack of goods in the shown countries, another possibility is that they can afford to sell at lower prices since they have a higher welfare level.

Conclusions

From these graphs we can understand the places that need more help and based on this show the result to the people who can do something to improve this situation.Obviously to do a complete research analysis we would need a greater amount of sources, possibly regarding the ratio between cost and revenue of the single countries.We should also consider that these countries have a local currency that may differ greatly from USD in the same way as the old lire in Italy granted a well-suited life, yet compared to the Euros, its ratio is much smaller.This might be a problem because more developed nations can invest and export at much lower costs than the rest of the world. This results in an excessively high purchasing power, which uses up a lot of resources for a lower-than-normal return on investment.