Water and Waste

Data Access Plan


As part of our funders’ active promotion of research data sharing, we plan to make the anonymised data collected through project fieldwork available to other researchers following the end of the project.

These data are likely to be of value to researchers interested in quantifying waste streams in developing countries and their subsequent environmental fates. They are also likely to interest those studying service access among off-grid urban populations, as well as those interested in water vendors and waste collectors as service providers to such populations.  There are some limitations to the use that our data can be put to.  Most notably, the need to protect data relating to human subjects prevents us from sharing detailed locational information, such as GPS coordinates.

We intend to make our data accessible to other bona fide researchers either 3 months after the project’s end-date or alongside publication of articles resulting from the project, whichever is sooner.  The current anticipated project end-date is March 2023, which would mean we would make our data available by July 2023, were we to follow the first option.

We plan to lodge a copy of our data with the UK Data Archive, generating meta-data to make the data discoverable by others. Should any data set be unsuitable for the UK Data Archive, we will make it available via University of Southampton’s Pure platform.   We will remove locational information and personal and meaningful household identifiers before archiving data from project fieldwork, so as to prevent any disclosure of personal information.  We do not plan to charge users for sharing our data. Following the University of Southampton Data Management Policy, we will store the underpinning raw data for 10 years.

The four project investigators at University of Southampton, University of Ghana, VIRED International and Jaramogi Oginda Odinga University of Science and Technology (JOOUST) will jointly oversee access to the project’s data. Researchers using the project data will be required to sign a data sharing agreement, which will set out the terms of appropriate use, publication and required acknowledgements, and data security arrangements.


Informal enquiries about data sharing

For informal enquiries concerning the data that will be generated through the project, please contact:

Prof. Jim Wright, Geography and Environment, University of Southampton, UK

Dr. Heini Väisänen, Department of Social Statistics and Demography, University of Southampton, UK


For the convenience of our participants with internet access, a copy of the University of Southampton’s privacy notice may be found here.