[self-promotion] 25 Years Of Official West African FX Rates — Daily Data From Central Banks, Now In One API

Been working on a gap I kept running into: getting official,

daily FX rates for West African countries programmatically.

The World Bank has this data but with a 6-12 month lag.

Everything else is either paywalled or scraped from aggregators

with no attribution.

So I built an actor that pulls directly from the issuing

central banks — CBN Nigeria, Bank of Ghana, BCEAO for the 8

WAEMU nations, and Banco de Cabo Verde. 11 countries, 4

currencies, history back to 1996 in some cases.

A few things I found interesting while building it:

The 8 WAEMU countries (Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Mali etc.)

share a currency pegged to the euro by treaty since 1999 —

at exactly 655.957 XOF/EUR, never changed. There’s no

independently set USD rate, it’s mathematically derived from

the ECB daily reference rate.

Every output record carries the source bank, URL, retrieval

timestamp and licence note — CBN explicitly grants permission

to copy with attribution which made things cleaner legally.

Available here if useful: https://apify.com/malmon/west-africa-fx-rates

Happy to answer questions about coverage or methodology.