The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) which announced this on Monday said the February inflation rate was driven by food and non-alcoholic beverages which rose by 9.2 per cent.
The report says food inflation moved from 25.18 per cent in January to 23. 51 per cent in February 2025.
The drop according to NBS was due to the drop in the prices of some food items including beans, maize, cassava among others.
The report also shows that urban inflation was 25.15 per cent.
Incidentally this report was released by some foreign media outlets hours before they were officially released by the NBS. A similar scenario that played out in January when the figures were released by some media houses before they were officially released by NBS. This calls to question, the security of official and important national data held by the statistics House.
Earlier this year, the NBS had changed the consumer price index base year from 2009 to 2024, an action it believes will give a more accurate inflation figures.
The rebasing also saw the introduction of some critical methodology changes to improve the computation processes and quality of the estimates.
Other improvement introduced by NBS is the exclusion of own-production, imputed rents, and gifted items from the aggregates used to come up with the weights.
The newly introduced Farm Produce Index, Energy Index, Services Index, Goods Index, and Imported Food Index, shows that farm produce index was 112.46, up from January rate I.77 per cent, energy index in February was 107.43, down from January rate by 0.99, services index 114 in February, imported food was 113 .38 up from 111.47 in January.
In recent times prices of food items have experienced a slight drop in prices, caused mainly by the arrival of grains imported during the import duty waiver window last year.