Pulse Lab Jakarta — AI nowcasting of food prices for Indonesia's national policy monitoring

Pulse Lab Jakarta was established in 2012 as a joint facility of Indonesia's Ministry of National Development Planning (Bappenas) and UN Global Pulse, working with the World Food Programme (WFP) and the FAO. From 2014, the lab developed a 'nowcasting' model that estimates near-real-time prices for four food commodities — beef, chicken, onion and chili — by mining public Twitter posts, as an early-warning input alongside official statistics for national food-security and inflation policymaking.

The modelled prices were validated against official government price data over roughly 15 months and reported as 'closely correlated,' though the exact correlation coefficient could not be independently confirmed from an accessible published source. The approach was extended through a companion citizen-reporter pilot in West Nusa Tenggara (NTB), where more than 200 volunteer reporters, recruited online and compensated with mobile-phone credit, submitted more than 65,000 individual price data points over 10 weeks via a mobile app — addressing gaps where traditional government surveys are slow, costly or hard to run in remote markets.

The lab was rebranded and expanded as UN Global Pulse Asia Pacific in 2023, and its partnership with Bappenas remains active. However, whether the original food-price nowcasting tool is still used operationally inside government inflation-monitoring workflows today, as opposed to having been a proof-of-concept that informed later systems, is not clearly documented in available sources.

Read the full analysis: https://www.unglobalpulse.org/project/nowcasting-food-prices-in-indonesia-using-social-media-signals-2014/