The Nigerian naira traded at around 130 to the dollar in 2015. By 2023 it had fallen past 700. By early 2024 it crossed 1,500. If you wanted to study that collapse programmatically — plot it, model it, build a product on top of it — you had one realistic option: pay Trading Economics $50/month or stitch together spreadsheets from the Central Bank of Nigeria's website by hand.
There's a better way now.
What This Is
west-africa-fx-rates is an Apify actor that scrapes and normalises official foreign exchange rates published daily by West African central banks. It covers 11 countries, 4 ISO currencies, with historical data going back to 1996 — all in a single, consistent JSON schema.
Coverage:
- Nigeria (NGN) — Central Bank of Nigeria NFEM official rate
- Ghana (GHS) — Bank of Ghana mid rate
- 8 WAEMU nations — Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Togo (XOF, via BCEAO/ECB)
- Cape Verde (CVE, via Banco de Cabo Verde/ECB)
The data comes directly from the issuing central banks — not from World Bank annual releases with a 6–12 month lag, not from aggregators who don't tell you where the number came from.
The WAEMU Angle (Worth Understanding)
Eight of the eleven countries share the West African CFA franc (XOF), which has been pegged to the euro by treaty since 1999 — at exactly 655.957 XOF per EUR, a rate that has never changed and is guaranteed by the French Treasury. There is no independently set USD rate for XOF. The USD equivalent is derived mathematically from the ECB's daily EUR/USD reference rate.
This is actually useful to know if you're building anything on West African FX data. It means:
- All 8 WAEMU countries have identical FX rates — one published source covers all of them
- The XOF/USD rate moves in lockstep with EUR/USD, not with any local monetary policy
- Cape Verde's escudo (CVE) is also euro-pegged, under a similar treaty at 110.265 CVE/EUR
The actor handles all of this transparently: derived rates are flagged as rateType: "derived" and sharedRate: true, but each country still gets its own row so you can filter and join on ISO country code.
Two Different Products in One Actor
For daily users: the usd-core snapshot
One API call, one charge ($0.10), latest USD rate for all 11 countries. If you're building a remittance calculator, a cross-border pricing engine, or a fintech dashboard that needs today's official CBN or BoG rate — this is it.
{
"country": "NG",
"currency": "NGN",
"date": "2026-05-28",
"usdMid": 1571.45,
"rateType": "published",
"midMethod": "published",
"source": {
"bank": "Central Bank of Nigeria",
"url": "https://www.cbn.gov.ng/rates/ExchRateByCurrency.html",
"retrievedAt": "2026-05-28T08:34:12Z",
"licence": "CBN grants explicit permission to copy with attribution"
}
}
At $0.10 per run, a daily schedule costs $2.20/month for all 11 countries.
For researchers: the historical dataset
This is the product that doesn't exist anywhere else at this price. A full year of daily USD rates for all 11 countries costs $11.40. Ten years costs $114. The naira series goes back to an arbitrary range; WAEMU and Ghana go back to 1999 and 1996 respectively.
# Pull 10 years of NGN and GHS history
{
"mode": "historical",
"countries": ["NG", "GH"],
"dateFrom": "2016-01-01",
"dateTo": "2026-01-01"
}
For context: this date range covers the 2016 Nigerian FX crisis, the 2022 Ghana debt crisis and subsequent cedi collapse, and the 2023–24 naira devaluation. Three major African currency events, clean daily data, one API call.
Data Quality Features Worth Knowing
A few things that took real engineering effort and matter if you're building on this in production:
Source attribution on every record. Bank name, URL, retrieval timestamp, as-of date, and licence note on every single output row. You always know exactly where a number came from.
midMethod documentation. The mid rate is calculated differently by different central banks — some publish it directly, others publish only buy/sell spreads. The field documents which method was used so you can adjust your models accordingly.
Freshness guard. Any source whose latest published date is more than 10 days old is silently dropped from the output rather than returning stale data as if it were current.
Warnings array. Anomalies (buying rate above selling rate, suspiciously large day-over-day moves) are flagged per record without crashing the run.
Independent source fetching. One central bank's site going down doesn't fail the run — you get data from the remaining sources with a warning in the affected record.
Who Is This For?
Fintech developers — particularly in the Nigerian and Ghanaian diaspora ecosystem. If you're building on Paystack, Flutterwave, or any cross-border payment infrastructure and you need the official CBN NFEM rate (not the parallel market rate, the official rate), this is the cleanest programmatic source.
Quantitative researchers — African currency dynamics are under-studied partly because clean, normalised historical data didn't exist. 25+ years of daily official rates for 11 countries in a consistent schema is a meaningful research dataset.
Cross-border e-commerce and SaaS platforms — companies operating across multiple West African markets need reliable FX inputs for pricing. The 11-country normalised output is designed for exactly this use case.
Data journalists — the naira devaluation trajectory, the WAEMU peg debate, Ghana's debt-driven cedi collapse. These are stories that need data. This actor returns structured, attributed data you can drop straight into a chart.
Legal Basis
This is worth being explicit about, because African data products have a complicated history with redistribution terms.
CBN Nigeria grants explicit permission to copy data with attribution — stated directly on their exchange rate page. Bank of Ghana and the ECB (source for XOF and CVE) carry no contractual redistribution restriction. The actor relies on the factual-data principle — copyright protects creative expression, not raw numbers — and attributes every record to its issuing bank.
Full legal rationale is documented in the actor README. Every record carries the relevant licence note in its source block.
Pricing
| Mode | Price |
|---|---|
usd-core snapshot (all 11 countries) |
$0.10 per run |
historical or all-currencies row |
$0.015 per (country, currency, date) point |
Daily usd-core schedule: ~$2.20/month
Full year of history, all 11 countries: ~$11.40
Full decade of history, all 11 countries: ~$114
Free tier available for new users.
What's Coming
This is the first actor in a planned regional family — East African, Southern African, and North African FX actors will follow in the same normalised schema. Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone are the remaining ECOWAS members not yet covered; source recon is underway.
Get Started
→ West Africa FX Rates on Apify Store
Data is sourced from official central bank publications. Attribution is included in every output record. This actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of the central banks listed. Data is provided for informational purposes and should not be used as the sole basis for financial or trading decisions.
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