Master Thesis

Food Security and Climate Shocks

The Resilience of Food Prices to Droughts in Malawi. A Machine Learning Approach.

This is the GitHub repository corresponding to the Master Thesis of L.Blind.

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Presentation

The thesis has been defended.

The presentation of the thesis defense can be found here.

Data

The data merges data on food prices for different commodities and markets provided by WFP, as well as climate data on droughts, based on the SPEI as a drought indicator.

The final dataset for Malawi can be found here.

Structure Malawi

• input folder Malawi
  • food price data
  • lon lat for markets
  • inflation data WFP
  • SPEI data*
• output folder Malawi
  • Summary statistics (Doc. Preproecessing)
  • Plots
• Source code
  • main (Run this to start the program)
  • Creation of dataset
  • Preprocessing
  • Analysis & Summary statistics
  • Visualization
  • Auxiliary funtions (utils)
  • Stata Correlation matrices per commodity

*Hint: For the SPEI dataset, Git LFS has been used as the file size exceeded 100 MB. It might be necessary for you to install that Git extension as well to derive the respective file (spei01.nc) in the climate data folder.

Food price data

Screenshot: WFP vam database

Food prices have been obtained via the open source database of WFP.
Temporal Unit of analysis: Month

Source:

• WFP vam database

Link used to extract data for central region [14.06.2022, 14:12]:

• Link

Coordinates of Markets

Further data upon market coordinates has been kindly provided upon request via the team of WFP.

Climate data (drought)

Screenshot: SPEI Global Drought Monitor

• SPEI Global Drought Monitor

• Selection Malawi

• Global SPEI Database

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Additional Useful Links

WFP

• VAM Resource Center
• Overview Malawi Dataviz