What the Kenya price data holds
5 Kenyan sources, all on 1 vocabulary. The official market table gives wholesale and retail per market and day for 195 commodities across all 47 counties from May 2021, about 1,000,000 rows, with fertilizer itself recorded at market level in 29 of them. Asking prices for straight fertilizers, pulled from public listings, give a second and more current reading, in practice mostly for Nairobi. A monthly market series reaches back to 2006. Coffee auction results carry minimum, average and maximum price per grade and sale along with bags and value; tea auction results carry the average price per grade and factory along with kilograms sold. Every row gets tagged by source, commodity, variety, market, county and unit, so 1 filter is enough to select any slice you need.
Units and currencies
Weight prices are always per kilogram and volume prices always per litre, whatever unit the market originally quoted in, 90 kg bags included. The auctions themselves settle in dollars and get stored 2 ways, per kilogram in dollars and in shillings at the sale date’s exchange rate, with that rate stored right beside them. A shilling figure can always be checked back against its dollar figure and the rate that produced it.
The vocabulary
Fertilizer is commodity=fertilizer with variety set to one of dap, urea, can, npk, mop, tsp, sulphate_of_ammonia and ammonia_anhydrous. Staples carry their own slugs instead: maize_dry, beans_dry, potatoes_irish, rice, wheat and the rest, with variety distinguishing white or yellow maize, rosecoco or mwitemania beans. Coffee grades follow the exchange’s own scheme, AA, AB, PB, C and the smaller grades, plus a market total; tea grades run BP1, PF1, PD, Dust 1 and the rest, with an aggregate across all smallholder factories.
Reading the Kenya price data samples
The DAP rows below cover the official table for the last fortnight: Kirinyaga’s main market at 145 retail, Kakamega’s at 114 to 136, Kisumu’s at 120 to 136. The asking-price rows show that same week’s Nairobi listings at 170 for DAP and 250 for CAN. The 52-week chart for Kirinyaga runs from 116 to 150 shillings with a clear step up at the long-rains planting in April. The maize chart lines Nairobi retail up over wholesale through a full year, the exact margin the platform tracks by county, and 3 rows in that year read 4,000 to 5,000 shillings per kilogram, plainly a bag price typed into the per-kilogram column by mistake. Rows like that stay in the dataset exactly as published; they simply never reach an analysis, because every analysis runs on a robust median with outlier rejection built in.
What the analyses add
Current price with a trust score, county rank, seasonality and a backtest of whether a month’s price beat the annual average, trend, retail-over-wholesale margin, affordability in kilograms of maize, a comparison of official against asking prices, per-market medians inside a county, and a county brief that folds price, demand, affordability, world market and recent news into 1 call.
Coverage of the Kenya price data
Fertilizer is recorded across 29 counties, but only a handful stay fresh enough to act on in any given week, and which ones those are keeps shifting. The staples, by contrast, are the genuinely deep part of the dataset, reported daily across many markets at once. Analyses return a low trust score wherever the data runs thin rather than fabricate a confident number anyway. Coffee and tea auctions pause between seasons, and the monthly series always lags the daily table.