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Article History

Received: 29 May 2019

Accepted: 13 January 2020

First Online: 20 January 2020

Ethics approval and consent to participate

: Data collection procedures and questionnaires of the DHDSS have been reviewed and approved by International Network of field sites with continuous Demographic Evaluation of Populations and Their Health (INDEPTH). Additionally, DHDSS protocols were reviewed and sanctioned by Ethical Committee of Ghana Health Service and DHRC Institutional Review Board (IRB).The researchers of DHDSS briefed each respondent as well as their household heads about the HDSS data collection at the beginning of every update-round. Participating individuals and households were encouraged to ask for any further clarification, after which a verbal consent was sought prior to the interview. Those who refused were excluded from the surveillance.Within each round of surveillance, samples of households were randomly generated for revisit by field supervisors to verify the information as well as whether verbal consent was sought by the interviewer. This process of obtaining consent and quality assurance was approved by INDEPTH, Ethical Committee of Ghana Health Service and DHRC IRB. Permission was obtained from the management of DHRC for use of secondary data for this study.To ensure confidentiality, names and other identifiers of the study participants were not included in the extracted data for this study.

: The consent to publish this article is not applicable.

: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.