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Article History

Received: 25 July 2018

Accepted: 24 March 2019

First Online: 30 April 2019

Ethics approval and consent to participate

: Informed verbal consent was obtained from all participants. The fundamental purpose of the data collection was to guide the implementation of trachoma elimination programmes. Consent to participate allowed survey teams to examine both eyes of the consenting individual on one occasion only. For this reason, and because local partners with whom the fieldwork protocol was discussed believe that verbal consent is more acceptable than written consent in the largely illiterate rural populations amongst whom the surveys was conducted, we obtained informed verbal consent. All data collection was electronic, using an ODQ-based Android phone application. Consent (or its refusal) was formally noted by a trained, registered data recorder, who has a unique identification number and a signature kept on file. At the conclusion of data collection for each evaluation unit, the recorder signed a statement affirming that informed verbal consent was appropriately obtained from each individual examined in the survey. The study and the verbal consent procedure was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (11909).

: Not applicable.

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