# Market prices — accra.cool > 10-staple food basket tracked across 11 Greater Accra markets, including Makola, Madina, and Kaneshie. Weekly refresh. ## Current snapshot - **basket up 7.0% over 5 weeks** — tracking the cedi slide and tomato surge - **Makola basket: GHS 521** — 10 staple items, consumer scale — up from GHS 487 in May - **Tomato up 38.8% MoM** — highest single-item inflation in the basket - **11 markets tracked** — across Greater Accra ## Why we track 10 staples across 11 markets Every household in Greater Accra buys roughly the same 10 items each week — rice, palm oil, tomato, plantain, yam, onion, eggs, fish, chicken, bread. The combined cost of those 10 items is the basket. We sample prices at 11 markets (Makola, Madina, Kaneshie, Agbogbloshie, Tema, Kasoa, 31st December, Mallam Atta, Osu, Dome, Nungua) every Tuesday and Wednesday. The basket total is the cleanest single number we have for everyday cost of living in Greater Accra — more honest than national CPI because it's sampled at the markets where Accra actually shops, not at the supermarkets where the upper middle class shops. ## Why tomato leads the basket Tomato is the single most volatile item we track. When tomato moves 38.8% in a month — as it did in May 2026 — the rest of the basket moves 2 to 3%. Two reasons. First, almost all of Accra's tomato comes from Volta Region farms and from cross-border supply via Burkina Faso. The May 2026 surge was driven by Burkina Faso regional instability disrupting the supply chain, on top of the Volta dry-season gap. Any rain disruption, fuel-price spike on the trucking route, or border-closure event prices through within 72 hours. Second, tomato has no good substitute in Ghanaian cooking — you can swap palm oil for groundnut oil, swap maize for rice, but you can't make jollof without tomato. That inelastic demand combined with concentrated supply makes tomato Accra's most reliable inflation leading indicator. Watch tomato; everything else follows. ## Why Makola is cheaper than Tema The same 10 items can cost ₵470 at Agbogbloshie wholesale, ₵521 at Makola retail, and ₵610 at the supermarket strip in East Legon. Three forces drive the spread. First, wholesale-vs-retail: Agbogbloshie sources directly from the Northern, Volta and Eastern Region farms, then breaks bulk for retailers. Second, distance from the supply chain: markets close to the wholesale terminals (Agbogbloshie, Mallam Atta, Madina) have cheaper produce; markets in the consumption zones (Osu, East Legon, Cantonments) carry a 10–25% premium. Third, demand mix: markets that serve professional buyers (chop bars, hotels) often have negotiated prices that retail walk-ins can't access. ## Reading the weekly basket move Single-week basket moves of under 2% are noise. Anything between 2% and 5% is signal — usually tied to a fuel pricing window or a weather event. Above 5% is a structural shift — currency, government policy, or regional supply chain. The May 2026 weekly moves clustered around 1.5–2.2%, with the big move coming in the monthly aggregate as tomato surged on Burkina Faso supply pressure. Comparing this week's move to the four-week running average tells you whether you're in a noise period or a trend period. ## How the cedi shows up in your shopping bill Roughly 40% of the basket by value is imported or has imported inputs — rice (Vietnamese and Thai), palm oil (Malaysian for the bulk of supply), wheat flour for bread (Turkish and Russian), fertiliser-grown produce (Moroccan urea). When the cedi weakened 4.6% in May, those import-heavy items rose 2.5–4% within four weeks. The pass-through isn't one-for-one because traders smooth the rise across cycles, but the direction is reliable. A weaker cedi today = a heavier basket bill within a month. ## How fuel shows up in your shopping bill Diesel is the freight cost of moving produce from Volta and Eastern Region farms to Greater Accra markets. When diesel moved past ₵17/L in June 2026, basket prices for produce items (tomato, plantain, yam, onion) ticked up 2–4 percentage points beyond what the cedi alone would have produced. Tomato is the most diesel-sensitive item because the supply chain is the longest. Bread is the least diesel-sensitive because it's baked locally with imported flour — the inputs are dollar-sensitive but the trucking leg is short. ## How we sample the basket Each Tuesday morning, a sampling pass visits Makola, Madina, Kaneshie, Agbogbloshie and three rotating markets. The other 4 markets are sampled Wednesday morning. At each market we price the same 10 items at consumer-scale quantities (5kg rice, 1.5L palm oil, half-crate eggs, etc.) and record the median quote across at least three sellers. Outlier quotes get dropped. The basket total is computed against the same scale for every market. The Makola figure is the most-cited because Makola is the most-visited general market in Accra; other markets are useful for triangulation. ## Methodology Basket sampling is manual, weekly, two days per week, three quotes per item per market minimum. We exclude supermarket prices entirely (different supply chain, different customer base). Item quantities are fixed to consumer-scale: 5kg rice, 1.5L palm oil, 1kg tomato, 1 bunch plantain, 1 large yam tuber, 1kg onion, half-crate eggs (15), 1kg tilapia, 1kg chicken, 1 loaf bread. The basket total is the simple sum across the 10 items at each market on each sampling date. --- Source: accra.cool. View the live interactive version at https://accra.cool/prices Attribution: accra.cool desk.