How we work

Methodology & glossary

This page is the rulebook for the numbers on the hub. If a figure looks surprising, start here — then follow the as-of date and source on the country page.

What the FX premium is

The premium is how much more expensive the market dollar is than the official one, as a percent. Positive means the market is weaker — you need more local currency to buy a dollar on the street or a P2P venue than the central bank’s published rate.

We compute it only on days when both legs exist:

premium = (market − official) / official × 100

If either rate is missing that day, there is no premium. We do not interpolate, carry forward, or plug in a zero.

Official vs parallel / market

Official is the central bank’s published rate (or a reference rate when that is what the bank posts). It is the number on the bank’s site, not a model.

Market is what people actually pay. We prefer a parallel (P2P) print when we have one. If a country has no usable parallel book, we fall back to a retail remittance quote. The badge on the country page tells you which.

A reference badge on the official row means the bank publishes a reference or indicative rate rather than a hard official fix. We still treat it as the official leg for the premium — we do not invent a second official series.

T-bill metric-type badges

Auction results are not all the same statistic. We print the figure as published and label how it was defined:

• weighted avg — volume-weighted average accepted yield (or rate) at that auction.
• cut-off — the highest accepted yield; the stop on the book.
• marginal — the marginal (last accepted) rate, when that is what the issuer reports.
• stop rate — the stop-out rate, used by some issuers instead of “cut-off”.
• discount rate — published as a discount, not converted to a bond-equivalent yield.
• yield — a simple published yield when the issuer does not specify the average/cut-off distinction.

If one country mixes types across tenors, each cell carries its own badge. We never convert a discount into a yield to make the curve look smoother.

Headline vs food vs core inflation

Headline is the all-items CPI year-on-year rate the statistics office leads with.

Food is the food (and usually non-alcoholic beverages) component. Useful when food is what actually moves the print.

Core is headline with some volatile items stripped out. There is no single African definition of “core.” Each office excludes a different basket, so we keep their wording and never rename it to a house standard.

Examples from the series we actually hold:

• Tunisia — “excluding food & energy” (Aug 2026)
• Tanzania — “excluding unprocessed food, energy & utilities” (Aug 2026)
• Rwanda — “excluding fresh food and energy” (Aug 2026)

If food or core is more than three months away from the headline month, we hide that chip rather than show a mismatched pair.

Cadence tiers

The country page is stacked in three tiers because the clocks are different:

• Tier 1 · Markets. Official FX and parallel/retail quotes. The public rates snapshot refreshes every 15 minutes; the country page is rebuilt from the same database.
• Tier 2 · Policy & prices. Policy rates change when the board meets. Inflation is monthly. T-bills land on auction day. Stock indexes are daily when we have a listed series.
• Tier 3 · Structure. Population, GDP, poverty, trade, democracy — annual (or rarer). IMF WEO debt and balances update with the April/October vintages. A yearly number is not “stale” the way a three-month-old CPI print is.

When a number goes dim

We keep the last published figure on the page and mark it stale, rather than deleting it or guessing the next one.

• Inflation — the reference month is stale once it is older than three months.
• T-bills — a bill (up to 364 days) dims after 45 days without a new auction; a bond tenor dims after 120 days.
• Food / core chips — dimmed when they lag the headline month (still shown if within three months).

Stale is a warning about freshness, not a verdict that the figure was wrong.

Why gaps stay blank

If a country has not published, or we have not yet collected, the cell is empty. We do not interpolate, carry the last value forward, or write a zero. A zero on this site means the source printed zero. Rankings omit countries that have no print; they are not ranked as “0.”

The same rule applies to CSV downloads: missing days and missing countries are simply not in the file.

Credit ratings

Sovereign credit ratings on this hub are editorially curated, not scraped. Every grade, outlook, and action date is verified against the rating agency’s own press release before publication — for example Fitch affirms Kenya at B- (17 Jul 2026).

Updates follow agency actions through a quarterly review cycle. We do not run an auto-collector against aggregator sites.

Grades are never averaged, blended, or converted to a numeric score. Each agency’s scale stays ordinal and separate. Unrated countries are shown as unrated — we do not impute a grade.

The published ledger is available as a JSON feed at /feeds/ratings.json for Ghost and other consumers (render what the feed says; do not reinterpret grades).

Sources

Every figure on a country page carries its as-of date and a source link. The families:

• Official FX — the country’s central bank (or the regional bank for the CFA zones). See the bank list below.
• Market FX — parallel quotes from P2P venues (Bybit and peers) when the book is usable; otherwise retail remittance quotes (Wise and peers).
• Policy rates — the same central banks, from the published instrument named on the country page.
• Inflation — national statistics offices, collected as published (headline, food, and core when the office prints them).
• T-bills and bonds — debt offices and central-bank auction results (DMO, CBK, UMOA-Titres, BEAC, BoU, and peers).
• Structure — World Bank World Development Indicators; IMF World Economic Outlook for debt, the current account, and the budget balance; V-Dem for electoral democracy; UN population for median age; EIA international series for crude production on producing countries only (no card, not a zero, when EIA has no series). Proved reserves appear the same way when EIA or OPEC publish a country series. Statutory minimum wages are a manual gazette seed in local currency (no USD conversion, not in the trajectory score); “no statutory minimum” is a recorded value.
• Trade partners and products — UN Comtrade, latest reported year. 2025 filings are still arriving.
• Commodities — World Bank Pink Sheet (monthly) and ICE Brent via FRED (daily).
• Stock indexes — Yahoo Finance chart series, where a national index is listed.
• Sovereign credit ratings — Fitch, Moody’s, and S&P long-term foreign-currency ratings, verified against each agency’s press release before publication (see Credit ratings above).

Central banks we read for policy rates and official FX:

• Banque d'Algérie — Taux directeur
• Banco Nacional de Angola — Taxa BNA
• BCEAO — Taux directeur (principal)
• Bank of Botswana — Monetary Policy Rate
• Banque de la République du Burundi — Taux directeur
• Banco de Cabo Verde — Taxa diretora
• BEAC — Taux d'intérêt des appels d'offres (TIAO)
• Banque Centrale des Comores — Taux directeur
• Banque Centrale de Djibouti — Taux directeur
• Banque Centrale du Congo — Taux directeur
• Central Bank of Egypt — Overnight deposit rate
• Bank of Eritrea — Policy rate
• Central Bank of Eswatini — Discount rate
• National Bank of Ethiopia — Policy rate
• Central Bank of The Gambia — Policy rate
• Bank of Ghana — Monetary Policy Rate
• Banque Centrale de la République de Guinée — Taux directeur
• Central Bank of Kenya — Central Bank Rate
• Central Bank of Lesotho — CBR (policy rate)
• Central Bank of Liberia — Monetary Policy Rate
• Central Bank of Libya — Policy rate
• Banque Centrale de Madagascar — Taux directeur
• Reserve Bank of Malawi — Policy rate
• Banque Centrale de Mauritanie — Taux directeur
• Bank of Mauritius — Key Repo Rate
• Bank Al-Maghrib — Taux directeur
• Banco de Moçambique — Taxa MIMO
• Bank of Namibia — Repo rate
• Central Bank of Nigeria — Monetary Policy Rate
• National Bank of Rwanda — Central Bank Rate
• Banco Central de São Tomé e Príncipe — Taxa diretora
• Central Bank of Seychelles — Policy Rate
• Bank of Sierra Leone — Monetary Policy Rate
• Central Bank of Somalia — Policy rate
• South African Reserve Bank — Policy rate (repo)
• Bank of South Sudan — Policy rate
• Central Bank of Sudan — Policy rate
• Bank of Tanzania — Central Bank Rate
• Banque Centrale de Tunisie — Taux directeur
• Bank of Uganda — Central Bank Rate
• Bank of Zambia — Monetary Policy Rate
• Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe — Bank policy rate

CSV files at /downloads/ repeat the source, URL, as-of date, and definition at the top of each file.