Cost Of Healthy Diet

CoHD

The Cost of a Healthy Diet (CoHD) 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 National average Cost of a Healthy Diet was N1,371 in October 2024. This shows an increase of 1.9% when compared
to the amount recorded in the previous month (September 2024, was N1,346).
 In October 2024, the average CoHD was highest in the South West at N1,656 per adult per day, compared to N1,149 per adult per day in North West.
 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.
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 availa
bility, 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.
Retail Food Prices
The retail food price data used in this analysis is collected by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) 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 computa
t
ion of the CoHD.
Healthy Diet Standard
In Nigeria, CoHD is the minimum cost of foods needed to meet international recommendations defined in the
Healthy Diet Basket (HDB), a globally relevant set of criteria that captures similarities across most national Food
Based Dietary Guidelines (FBDG) (Table 1). The HDB was created as a comparable standard to calculate and com
pare the cost and affordability of healthy diets across countries; the HDB is most relevant for countries where
there is not yet a quantified national FBDG, like Nigeria.