Monitoring Food Prices Using Mobile Technologies through the FENIX Platform

1. Monitoring Food Prices Using Mobile Technologies through the FENIX Platform Overview Regional Conference on the Use of Mobile Technology for Statistical Processes 13 – 16 October 2015 ECA, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia • Fabio Grita • FENIX/CountrySTAT team leader • FAO Statistics Division

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. How it works Enter market name and use GPS or the map to store its location Set the work environment Add a new market

8. How it works 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

9. 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://fenixapps.fao.org/crowdprices/) 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

10. 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

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

12. What is FENIX A collection of software tools, methods and standards to facilitate acquisition, management and analysis of large, diversified and distributed sets of data.

13. Common data issues • Lack of data and metadata harmonization • Poor data dissemination systems/mechanisms • Restrictive or unclear data policy • Poor communication and awareness

14. Consequences • The power and potentials of the data are not exploited • Data is not widely accessible/shared • Systems work in isolation

15. What’s needed • Avail data as “public good” • Ensure interoperability between IT systems • Consider users’ requirements in the IT system design • Strengthen the international, regional and national institutional networks

16. Key features • Based on Open Source software; no licensing constraints and full redistribution rights • Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) • Extensible: ability to plug-in new functionalities and applications • Data sharing through web services (APIs) • Diversified data collection/upload methods • Ability to handle different type of data • Data search system based on metadata • Advanced analytical capacities with the embedded “R” statistical package

18. FENIX Metadata Standards • Metadata: Information about data (the ID of the data) • Metadata standards used in FENIX: • Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange (SDMX) • ISO 19115 • Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) • Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI)