The National Bureau of Statistics said it cost an average of N858 to eat the lowest kind of locally prepared healthy diet in Nigeria throughout January 2024.
According to the NBS, the Cost of a Healthy Diet is the least expensive combination of locally available items that meets globally consistent food-based dietary guidelines. It is used as a measure of physical and economic access to healthy diets. This is a lower bound (or floor) of the cost per adult per day excluding the cost of transportation and meal preparation.
The NBS in its Cost of a Healthy Diet for January 2024, released on Friday, said the average CoHD was highest in the South West at N1, 045 per adult per day, compared to N683 per adult per day in the North West during the period under review.
Explaining the difference between CoHD and CPI, NBS said, “In recent months, the CoHD has risen faster than general inflation and food inflation. However, the CoHD and the food CPI are not directly comparable; the CoHD includes fewer items and is measured in Naira per day, while the food CPI is a weighted index.”
The report stressed that, “Food environments determine a household’s physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food for an active and healthy life. A suite of indicators known as the Cost and Affordability of a Healthy Diet (CoAHD) have been developed to improve the measurement of food access and are now monitored globally by the United Nations and the World Bank as a metric of food security.
“The Cost of a Healthy Diet (CoHD) metric uses the availability, price, and nutritional composition of retail food items to identify the least expensive combination of items that meet requirements for a healthy diet. To compute the Cost of a Healthy Diet indicator, the following data are required: (a) Retail Food Prices, (b) Food Composition Data, and (c) Healthy Diet Standard.”
The retail food price data used in this analysis is collected by the National Bureau of Statistics monthly from 10,534 informants spread across the country, from urban and rural outlets in each state and FCT.
NBS collects these prices routinely for monitoring inflation, including prices of over 200 retail food items. Nearly 150 of these food items are potentially included in a healthy diet and the price data for these items are used for the computation of the CoHD.
“The Cost of a Healthy Diet provides important information about food access, a key aspect of food security, which is useful for government, civil society and development partners, the private sector and researchers.
For instance, where the Cost of a Healthy Diet is high, it is possible to identify which least-cost items and food groups are driving the high cost. Stakeholders can identify supply challenges in specific foods or food groups to be addressed, for example with improved production, distribution, or market access,” NBS stated.
