Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Read more about our team and the partners involved here.

Save Money: Having current, accurate data can save you substantial programme costs. The Tropical Data service is free, which saves you from having to design and build your own data collection platform.

Quality: Our proven approach to data management, including cleaning and analysis will ensure that your data is fit for purpose and readily accessible. We also have a complete training system to support countries in certifying their teams in a standardised way.

Global Standard: Tropical Data uses WHO standardised methodologies to maintain high-quality data. We strive to ensure our methods are in line with the latest global guidelines, working closely with global experts and health ministries.  

Collaboration: We support inter and intra-county collaboration. Our team and our global network of certified trainers ensure that experiences and learnings are shared with all the countries we work. 

A complete service: We provide a flexible and responsive service, working to support countries at every step. We have had great feedback from our colleagues: 

We ask for a minimum of 6 weeks’ notice to provide support, especially if you require us to supply and ship any materials, or if you require support from qualified Tropical Data trainers from outside the country.

We are very happy to help you start making preparations earlier than this, for instance by supporting you in drafting the survey protocol. We encourage the protocol to be finalised as early as possible, ideally before the budget is prepared, to ensure that the protocol and budget align and that you allocate sufficient funds to complete surveys. (Resources to support planning can be found here.) 

We can provide support with less notice than this in very specific circumstances, although this is not guaranteed. Please get in touch with us as early as possible!

For non-standard or operational research projects we require a minimum of 8 weeks' notice, although we encourage you to get in touch as early as possible.

Please get in touch with us as early as possible by submitting a request here, after which we will be in touch to confirm what support is required. You may also like to visit our resources page, which has many useful resources, including a protocol writing guide, an activity planning template and checklist, a budget template and a training manual (primarily used by trainers, however, it also contains useful planning chapters for those coordinating the work). 

Tropical Data is able to provide certain specialist materials as outlined below. We organise and run regular international Training of Trainer workshops to build training capacity and ensure existing trainers are kept up to date. 

Where local trainers are available to support national training efforts, we will work with them to ensure that they have all the necessary materials and support to conduct the training. Where countries do not have any local trainers, or insufficient numbers, Tropical Data is able to fund external trainers to support. This includes any travel costs to get the trainer to the country and any consultancy fees. We ask hosting countries to fund in-country hosting costs, as they would for any local trainers (including local transport, accommodation and meals). 

Tropical Data is able to provide and ship loupes, follicle size guide stickers, hard copy training manuals and 3D goggles (used for training only). Please contact us to request materials or indicate any requirements in your application.  

We can fund the purchase of phones for data collection. Due to shipping restrictions, these must be purchased by a local stakeholder and we can then reimburse the costs. Please discuss this with us first to ensure the appropriate process is followed and documentation records are kept. 

All aspects of our service are available in English and French.  Training materials are available in English, French, Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese. Many of our supporting resources are available in most of these languages too. If you have any questions or cannot find what you are looking for in a relevant language, please contact us. 

Tropical Data can support Operational Research, in the following ways (subject to the type of OR project it is and whether our team has the capacity to support with the proposed project timeline):

Subject to discussion, Tropical Data can also support the inclusion of additional questions/variables that support programmatic decision-making. This can be done either through the addition of these variables to the relevant data collection form, or within the ‘additional notes’ section of the resident form. Any additional (non-standard) data will not be processed, cleaned or analysed by the Tropical Data team and are the responsibility of the country and their partners. 

If you wish to collect specimens such as dried blood spots or ocular swabs (methods commonly referred to as ‘plus’ surveys), we are working to offer a standardised package of support for these. In the meantime, we treat these as Operational Research as described above. We do have some draft resources available to support the planning and undertaking of ‘plus’ surveys, please review our resources pages for more details.   

As a reminder, for non-standard or operational research projects we require a minimum of 8 weeks' notice, although we encourage you to get in touch as early as possible.

Tropical Data does not collect data on facial cleanliness, for reasons including the lack of an agreed definition of "clean face", problems with reproducibility of the measurement at programmatic level, and the fact that programmes should continue to implement measures to encourage facial cleanliness as long as the prevalence of TF in 1-9-year-olds is 5% or greater.* If you would like to collect data on facial cleanliness, please record your observations in the "additional notes" section of the resident form; data will be available for you to download and analyse as you see fit. 

* The NNN-WHO WASH toolkit has an asterisk next to facial cleanliness, indicating the indicator is: “…investigational, requiring further research to confirm their programmatic relevance, repeatability, utility and/or safety.” (relevant pages: 236, 252, 254)

In some cases, for example, if the cluster cannot be found, the teams may be able to visit the next nearest cluster and continue their work. 

However, should there be barriers to accessing the cluster and wider area, the teams should escalate this to their supervisors. The national team should then discuss the issue with Tropical Data to confirm a solution and ensure surveys can continue and are not subject to sampling bias. Be sure to reiterate that if the protocol cannot be followed for any reason, the teams should escalate this and not take any decisions upon themselves. 

If issues are known in advance of the fieldwork, for example potential flooding caused by the rainy season, it could be that decisions are made to reschedule the surveys to avoid the rains. If it is known that some clusters will be inaccessible due to insecurity, it may be better to pause the work until the situation becomes more stable to avoid a big break in data collection within a given EU and not to have to mobilise teams over multiple time periods. 

Teams should also escalate to their supervisors where entire populations have migrated away from the selected cluster. Ideally, this would be identified during planning and sensitisation, and again, solutions can be agreed by the national programme and the Tropical Data team to mitigate the issue. 

Tropical Data’s role is to support health ministries to conduct prevalence surveys, with the process and data owned by health ministries. As such, for anyone requiring anything more than the prevalence categories shared on the Trachoma Atlas and ESPEN portal, requests will need to be made to the respective health ministry. Tropical Data will not share the data. Health ministry ownership of data is a fundamental Tropical Data principle. 

We would recommend you contact the country focal point to request the data. If the country would like Tropical Data to support the preparation of the dataset required (for instance, for a research project), the country focal point can email the data team with the specifics of the data being requested. A link to download these data will be sent to the country focal point, for them to share with the data requestor. Please note that this request is in addition to the routine services Tropical Data provides, but will be actioned as soon as possible. Timelines will depend on the size and complexity of the data request being made.

We strongly discourage countries from interpreting anything from the cluster-level prevalence results, as the surveys are not powered to provide reliable, programme-ready information at that level. Even if the cluster-level prevalence result was accurate for the group of households surveyed in the cluster, we do not know the prevalence in non-sampled households or clusters. Therefore, for example, trachoma ‘hotspots’ could be missed, which would have implications for reaching trachoma elimination targets if the results were used for programmatic decision-making at a more micro level. Instead, decisions should be made at the EU level, with the EU-level adjusted prevalence data.

For these reasons, Tropical Data does not provide these results except in the singular circumstance in which a specific research question is being addressed and Tropical Data will be explicitly involved in helping to answer it. All the data are, in any case, available to you, should you wish to do the analyses yourselves on the cleaned dataset.

Tropical Data does not have any dedicated resources at present to support countries with drafting publications, please visit our resources page where we have a series of videos to guide you through the publication writing process. Subject to timelines and capacity, we may be able to provide some support such as the provision of results in a common format for publications. Please contact us to discuss this.