electricsheepafrica/africa-worldbank-economy-growth

Economy & Growth — Africa (World Bank WDI)

🌍 517,335 observations · 54 Africa countries · 1960–2025 · Repackaged by Electric Sheep Africa

TL;DR

This dataset contains 517,335 observations of Economy & Growth data across 54 Africa countries, spanning 1960–2025, covering 252 distinct indicators.

About the source

The World Bank's World Development Indicators (WDI) is the world's most-cited reference for global development data. It compiles officially-recognized international statistics from national accounts, government agencies, and partner organizations (IMF, WHO, FAO, UNESCO, ILO, UN agencies). The WDI covers over 1,400 indicators across 21 topics for 217 economies, with annual updates as new data become available.

• Source: World Bank
• Publisher: World Bank Group
• License: cc-by-4.0
• Topic: Economy & Growth

Methodology

Data is pulled directly from the World Bank's public API (api.worldbank.org/v2) for every indicator tagged to this topic across all countries in the region. Records with no observed value are dropped. Years are normalized to integers; values are coerced to float64.

Geographic coverage

54 Africa countries · top rows shown below, sorted by row count:

Country	Rows	First year	Last year
ZAF	14,056	1960	2025
EGY	13,113	1960	2025
KEN	13,071	1960	2025
MAR	12,960	1960	2025
CMR	12,858	1960	2025
BWA	12,736	1960	2025
TUN	12,675	1960	2025
SEN	12,666	1960	2025
BEN	12,371	1960	2025
COG	12,287	1960	2024
MDG	12,238	1960	2024
TGO	11,824	1960	2025
MRT	11,778	1960	2025
GAB	11,719	1960	2025
MLI	11,690	1960	2025
...	39 more countries

Indicators (sample)

• BG.GSR.NFSV.GD.ZS — Trade in services (% of GDP)
• BM.GSR.CMCP.ZS — Communications, computer, etc. (% of service imports, BoP)
• BM.GSR.FCTY.CD — Primary income payments (BoP, current US$)
• BM.GSR.GNFS.CD — Imports of goods and services (BoP, current US$)
• BM.GSR.INSF.ZS — Insurance and financial services (% of service imports, BoP)
• BM.GSR.MRCH.CD — Goods imports (BoP, current US$)
• BM.GSR.NFSV.CD — Service imports (BoP, current US$)
• BM.GSR.ROYL.CD — Charges for the use of intellectual property, payments (BoP, current US$)
• BM.GSR.TOTL.CD — Imports of goods, services and primary income (BoP, current US$)
• BM.GSR.TRAN.ZS — Transport services (% of service imports, BoP)
• ... and 242 more indicators

Schema

Column	Type	Description	Example
indicator_id	string	World Bank WDI indicator code (e.g. SP.POP.TOTL)	BM.GSR.CMCP.ZS
indicator_name	string	Human-readable indicator name	Communications, computer, etc. (% of …
country_iso2	string	ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code	DZ
country_iso3	string	ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country code (preferred join key)	DZA
country_name	string	English country name as published by the World Bank	Algeria
year	int64	Year of observation (CE)	2024
value	float64	Observed indicator value	42.6393182469306
unit	string	Unit of measurement (often empty)	``
obs_status	string	World Bank observation-status flag (e.g. preliminary, estimated)	``

Data quality & caveats

• Records with null observations are filtered out at ingest.
• Indicator coverage varies by country and year; not every (indicator × country × year) combination is present.
• Some countries appear under multiple aggregate groupings in WB; this dataset is filtered to individual sovereign states only.

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("electricsheepafrica/africa-worldbank-economy-growth")
df = ds["train"].to_pandas()
print(df.head())

Filter to one country

kenya = df[df["country_iso3"] == "KEN"]

Time-series for a single indicator

sample = (df[df["indicator_id"] == "BM.GSR.CMCP.ZS"]
          .sort_values("year"))
sample.plot(x="year", y="value", title="BM.GSR.CMCP.ZS")

Pivot to country × year matrix

matrix = (df[df["indicator_id"] == "BM.GSR.CMCP.ZS"]
          .pivot_table(index="year", columns="country_iso3", values="value"))
print(matrix.tail())

Citation

@misc{africa_worldbank_economy_growth_2025,
  title        = {Economy & Growth — Africa (World Bank WDI)},
  author       = {World Bank Group},
  year         = {2025},
  url          = {https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world-development-indicators},
  publisher    = {HuggingFace Datasets, repackaged by Electric Sheep Africa},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/electricsheepafrica/africa-worldbank-economy-growth}}
}

License

Released under cc-by-4.0.

Original data © World Bank Group. When using this dataset, please cite both the original source above and the Electric Sheep Africa repackaging.

About Electric Sheep

Electric Sheep Africa is part of the Electric Sheep mission: a unified, ML-ready data layer for Africa on HuggingFace. We pull data from authoritative open sources, normalize the schemas, package as Parquet, and publish with consistent dataset cards so researchers and developers can use load_dataset() to start working in seconds.

Browse the full collection: huggingface.co/electricsheepafrica

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Provenance: ingested 2026-05-26 via the Electric Sheep pipeline. Source URL: https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world-development-indicators