With less than half of the worldʼs urban population having safely managed sanitation due to the high cost and difficulty of building sewers and treatment plants, many rely on off-grid options like pit latrines and septic tanks, which are hard to empty and often lead to illegal waste dumping; this research focuses on container-based sanitation (CBS) as an emerging off-grid solution. Off-grid sanitation refers to waste management systems that operate independently of centralized infrastructure and CBS is a service providing toilets that collect human waste in sealable containers, which are regularly emptied and safely disposed of. These data relate to a project investigating CBS in Kenya, Peru, and South Africa, focusing on how different user groups access and utilize sanitation – contrasting CBS with other types. Participants, acting as citizen scientists, collected confidential data through a dedicated smartphone app designed by the authors and external contractors. This project aimed to explore the effective scaling, management, and regulation of off-grid sanitation systems, relevant to academics in urban planning, water and sanitation services, institutional capability, policy and governance, and those addressing inequality and poverty reduction.
The 12-month data collection period offered participants small incentives for weekly engagement, in a micro payment for micro tasks approach. Participants were randomly selected, attended a training workshop, and (where needed) were given a smartphone which they could keep at the end of the project. We conducted weekly smartphone surveys in over 300 households across informal settlements. These surveys aimed to understand human-environment interactions by capturing daily life, wellbeing, income, infrastructural service use, and socioeconomic variables at a weekly resolution, contributing to more informed analyses and decision-making.
The smartphone-based approach offers efficient, cost-effective, and flexible data collection, enabling extensive geographical coverage, broad subject areas, and frequent engagement. The Open Data Kit (ODK) tools were used to support data collection in the resource-constrained environment with limited or intermittent connectivity.
How do people living in informal settlements actually experience their daily sanitation challenges? Traditional research methods struggle to answer this question because they’re expensive, logistically difficult, and can only capture snapshots in time. This groundbreaking data article describes a year-long study that turned over 300 residents in informal settlements across three countries into “citizen scientists,” using smartphones to report their weekly experiences with sanitation, water access, wellbeing, and daily life. The research focused on container-based sanitation (CBS), an off-grid system where human waste is collected in sealable containers and regularly emptied for safe disposal, which is emerging as a potential solution for the nearly 2 billion people worldwide who lack access to safely managed sanitation.
The research team developed a sophisticated yet user-friendly smartphone survey system using Open Data Kit (ODK) software and a custom app called Data Exchange. Over 80 weeks, participants in Nairobi (Kenya), Lima (Peru), and Cape Town (South Africa) received weekly notifications to complete short surveys in their preferred language (English, Swahili, Spanish, or Xhosa). The surveys covered diverse topics including sanitation access and quality, water sources, household expenditures, wellbeing (using standardized World Health Organization measures), electricity disruptions, livelihood shocks, and poverty indicators. Participants earned points for completing surveys, which were converted to mobile data and talk time essentially paying people fairly for their time while also providing them with smartphones they could keep. The study achieved an impressive 76% average weekly response rate in Kenya, though rates varied by country, generating over 3,500 individual surveys and producing 16 comprehensive datasets now publicly available to researchers worldwide.
The significance of this work extends far beyond sanitation. By successfully deploying high-frequency smartphone surveys in resource-constrained environments over an extended period, the research team demonstrated a scalable, cost-effective methodology for understanding the daily realities of marginalized urban communities. The datasets reveal not just what sanitation systems people use, but how these systems intersect with poverty, gender, wellbeing, and vulnerability to shocks like illness or economic crises. This granular, longitudinal data can inform more responsive urban planning, more effective poverty reduction strategies, and more equitable service provision. The methodology itself treating participants as active collaborators rather than passive subjects, compensating them fairly, and building local technical capacity offers a model for ethical, participatory research in contexts where conventional data collection methods often fail.
This innovative dataset and methodology offer invaluable resources for researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and urban planners seeking to understand the lived experiences of informal settlement residents and design more effective, equitable interventions for sanitation and beyond.
Lewis, A. R., Bell, A. R., Casas, A., Kupiec-Teahan, B., Mendoza Sanchez, J., Willcock, S., Anciano, F., Barrington, D. J., Dube, M., Hutchings, P., Karani, C., Llaxacondor, A., López, H., Mdee, A. L., Ofori, A. D., Riungu, J. N., Russel, K. C., & Parker, A. H. (2024). Comparative sanitation data from high-frequency phone surveys across 3 countries. Data in Brief, 55, 110635. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2024.110635
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