Geneva, November 2021
In cooperation with CorrelAid Switzerland and an in-country NGO in Lebanon, volunteers from DataCross prototyped a tool for tracking prices experienced by vulnerable refugee families.
For some time now, Lebanon has suffered from hyperinflation, which disproportionately affects the most vulnerable in society. On a daily basis, migrants and refugees are particularly exposed to strong price fluctuations, price speculation and potentially even fraud.
Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash
Volunteer data scientists from DataCross developed a price tracking tool to make the prices of essential goods such as nappies, toothpaste or shampoo more transparent. For this purpose, the team used a method called web-scraping to obtain publicly accessible pricing data from wholesalers' websites, and made the available to a broad audience using a web app.
The price monitoring dashboard is available online: https://bzlato.shinyapps.io/dashboard-range
"We wanted to provide a tool that benefits both consumers as well as local NGOs providing financial support," explains Colin Walder, the team lead of the project at DataCross.
Since the end of July 2021, pricing data is collected once per day from online markets Spinneys and Carrefour Lebanon. Prices from multiple products in each relevant category (shampoo, diapers, etc.) are collected, and the median and range of prices is calculated and displayed.
The data is presented as a time series to make the price evolution easily traceable. The web tool is interactive; users can read the median price of a product category on a particular day directly from the graph.
"We tracked the prices of a standard basket of goods, defined with our local partner, to help guide their support to vulnerable families," says Colin. "But consumers as well as charities can also examine the price range and evolution of individual products."
The tool is easy to maintain, and thus well suited for challenging contexts. The same approach can easily be adapted for other price monitoring needs around the globe.
The local organisation and DataCross hope to use this tool to inform better those who are most affected by fluctuating prices. The team showed that publicly available data can be used to create a reliable, accessible and up-to-date source of pricing information for consumers and partner organisations.
