Comparative sanitation data from high-frequency phone surveys across 3 countries.

With less than half of the world's 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.

Social dynamics of short term variability in key measures of household and community wellbeing in Bangladesh.

High-frequency social data collection may facilitate improved recall, more inclusive reporting, and improved capture of intra-period variability. Although there are examples of small studies collecting particular variables at high frequency in the social science literature, to date there have been no significant efforts to collect a wide range of variables with high frequency. We have implemented the first such effort with a smartphone-based data collection approach, systematically varying the frequency of survey task and recall period, allowing the analysis of the relative merit of high-frequency data collection for different key variables in household surveys.

Smart subsidies for catchment conservation in Malawi.

Conservation agriculture (CA) is a management paradigm in which soil is covered outside of cropping seasons, minimally disturbed, and recharged with nitrogen-fixing legumes. Finding effective ways to encourage CA is a centuries-old problem playing out acutely today in Sub-Saharan Africa. To better understand this issue, we have collected data on rural livelihoods and CA adoption during a two-year intervention in southern Malawi.

Real-Time Social Data Collection in Rural Bangladesh via a 'Microtasks for Micropayments' Platform on Android Smartphones.

The advent of cheap smartphones in rural areas across the globe presents an opportunity to change the mode with which researchers engage hard-to-reach populations. In particular, smartphones allow researchers to connect with respondents more frequently than standard household surveys, opening a new window into important short-term variability in key measures of household and community wellbeing. In this paper, we present early results from a pilot study in rural Bangladesh using a 'microtasks for micropayments' model to collect a range of community and household living standards data using Android smartphones.

Reimagining cost recovery in Pakistan's irrigation system through willingness-to-pay estimates for irrigation water from a discrete choice experiment.

It is widely argued that farmers are unwilling to pay adequate fees for surface water irrigation to recover the costs associated with maintenance and improvement of delivery systems. In this paper, we use a discrete choice experiment to study farmer preferences for irrigation characteristics along two branch canals in Punjab Province in eastern Pakistan. We find that farmers are generally willing to pay well in excess of current surface water irrigation costs for increased surface water reliability and that the amount that farmers are willing to pay is an increasing function of their existing surface water supply as well as location along the main canal branch.

Cattle, clean water, and climate change: policy choices for the Brazilian Agricultural Frontier.

In the Amazonian agricultural frontier, pasture for cattle ranching is an important and potentially hazardous form of land use because of sediment erosion as pastures degrade. This relationship between ranching, sediment load, and water quality is likely to further exacerbate environmental impacts, particularly in the context of climate change. We examine the role that river basin councils (RBCs) - a water governance option of Brazil's 1997 National Water Act - might play in managing this nonpoint-source pollution in the Amazônian state of Rondônia.