Esoko, GNA to launch commodity price index
Esoko, a private technology platform and consulting service that helps organizations to profile people and manage the information flows between them, has officially partnered the Ghana News Agency (GNA) to further develop an effective agricultural commodity index and to also enhance the service.
The index, to be known as the Esoko–GNA Commodity Index (EGCI), will track both retail and wholesale prices. Therefore, EGCI-R will cover retail prices and EGCI-W will cover wholesale prices.
Esoko collects and provides content such as prices, bids and offers, weather, and agricultural tips to which users can subscribe. Esoko also provides a powerful set of tools so that organizations can manage their own information and content: not only pushing out alerts and advisories to the field, but also tracking information from the field (like activities, compliance, profiles, etc).
With GNA’s market dominance in information gathering and dissemination, the partnership is aimed at ensuring that in the wider context, commodity market prices are monitored, and the public provided with market-oriented information.
“Every member of the GNA family is excited about today, which marks another significant chapter in the Agency’s history. This new initiative is a statement of intent; our belief is that GNA must start to engage in other areas of information gathering, to shape business and public policy direction”, Mr Bernard Otabil, General Manager of GNA stated when a team from Esoko paid a working visit to the Agency in Accra on Monday.
Mr Otabil also explained that under the partnership, GNA would editorialise the price data received from Esoko’s platform and to feed the public.
He further explained that a special publication, which would be dubbed: “Market Intelligence” would be made available to only fully-paid subscribers of the Agency every fortnight.
Mr Stephen Awuah, Ghana Country Co-ordinator of Esoko expressed optimism that the collaboration with GNA would enable Esoko to leverage the Agency’s potential to drive the market index, and in particular improve the agricultural value chain process for all actors.
The index is a cash market price index composed of data on physical commodity markets. The aggregation methodology chosen for the EGCI uses weighted average calculation based on prices across selected markets.
It should, however, be noted that no future market prices are used in its composition (it isn’t a rolling index like the Dow Jones-AIG Commodity Index) and it is not tradable (such as the S&P GSCI).
The EGCI has been developed to assist analysts and policymakers, as well as the media, to keep track of commodity prices.
According to Mr Otabil, with the planned commodity exchange in Ghana, the GNA would use its unmatched network across the country to provide a strong backstopping service, as far as information flow is concerned.
Source: GNA