African Central Bank Data Now Available from AFED

AFED's coverage enhanced with the addition of African Central Bank data .


London, July 21st 2014 - Exchange Data International (EDI), a global provider of specialised financial information to market participants, announces the enhancement of its online African Financial and Economic Data service - AFED. The Service now includes African Central Bank economic data reported directly from source.

As from today subscribers to the service can not only access key African economic and financial information captured from 89 multilateral sources, but also retrieve data from the Central Banks of Egypt, Morocco and Malawi as well as from the Central Bank of West African States and the Bank of Central African States, providing coverage, in total, across 20 African countries.

In the coming months AFED will extend reporting to all African Central Banks, and thereafter move on to the inclusion of data published by National Offices of Statistics and Ministries of Finance, making the service an unparalleled reference source of macroeconomic and financial information for all 54 countries in Africa.

Launched in May this year, AFED provides subscribers with dedicated access to a comprehensive suite of Africa centric economic, macro-economic and financial information. The AFED macroeconomic database is arranged into 13 Topics - National Accounts, Inflation, Prices & Wages, Politics, Money & Banking, Population & Health and so on, covering over 18,000 economic indicators. In turn these extend right across known measures of economic performance (such as GDP per Capita) to a country’s environmental performance index, and on to those relating to civil society - for instance inequality and corruption perception indices. All figures are reported as published by the source leaving clients the choice to adjust if required.

AFED is the only database that enables clients to efficiently compare sources reporting on the same indicator; all data collected is normalised. Subscribers can easily retrieve any and all data relating to their points of interest, whether directly from the online platform or via MS Excel using AFED’s integrated plug-in.

"Our goal is to provide a granular coverage of all African countries. For the past three years, we have been working on sourcing and formatting the data, so our clients can easily compare sources without having to manipulate the data at their end. To ensure data quality we are releasing one set of data at a time; we went first with multilaterals and are now in the process of publishing local sources data starting with the Central Banks." - Jonathan Bloch, CEO at EDI.

In addition to the macroeconomic data, AFED also includes a number of established EDI datasets, rounding out its dedicated subscriber Service by providing a detailed overview of African economies and their financial markets. This Capital Markets Module includes Equity and Listed Bond prices, Fixed Income reference data, Stock Exchange Indices and FX and Interest rates.

For anyone already with, or now seeking, an African footprint, and who understands the need for good information in order to make good decisions, AFED provides direct access to standardised, consolidated, comprehensive, collated and clear data of both depth and accuracy derived only from trusted, named sources.