Designing a Real-Time Agricultural Market Price Monitoring System for North West Nigeria

Farmers and traders in North West Nigeria lack access to real-time market price data, creating information asymmetries that disadvantage smallholders in commodity negotiations. This study designed a real-time agricultural market price monitoring system for the North West geopolitical zone, covering Kano, Kaduna, Katsina, and Sokoto States. A professional system design methodology was applied, drawing on structured consultations with 20 market traders, 12 agricultural extension officers, and 8 ICT for agriculture specialists, alongside benchmarking against ESOKO, WFP VAM price monitoring systems, and the Nigerian National Agricultural Land Development Authority market information models. The system designed specifies an SMS-based data collection protocol for rural market price reporters, a central PostgreSQL database with automated validation rules, REST API endpoints for third-party integration, and a web and USSD dashboard accessible to farmers without smartphones. Price imputation algorithms for missing weekly data using k-nearest neighbour methods are detailed. Expert review by ten agritech and food systems data specialists confirmed the system's operational and technical adequacy for the North West context. The study recommends establishing the monitoring network at 45 priority markets identified through geospatial coverage analysis, partnering with NADDC for data collection staffing, and integrating the price feed into NAERLS and KARDA advisory services to ensure farmer reach across the four covered states.

Keywords: agricultural market price monitoring, real-time data, North West Nigeria, USSD, food systems analytics