Sidahmed, Sahar
Geyer, Siegfried
Beller, Johannes
Funding for this research was provided by:
Medizinische Hochschule Hannover (MHH)
Medizinische Hochschule Hannover (MHH)
Article History
Received: 29 September 2022
Accepted: 1 February 2023
First Online: 14 February 2023
Declarations
:
: The authors declare no competing interests.
: The analyses presented in the manuscript are based on anonymized DHS data, funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) with contributions from other donors such as UNICEF, UNFPA, WHO, and UNAIDS. The DHS Program follows strict privacy standards for participants and their households in all surveys. Procedures and questionnaires are reviewed and approved by the ICF Institutional Review Board, and by a local review board in the host country. In South Africa it was reviewed and approved by the SAMRC (South African Medical Research Council) ethics committee. Prior to any interview or test, informed consent is obtained and participants have the right to decline or end participation at any time. The respondent’s identity and information will be kept confidential.As the manuscript only contains a secondary data analysis that has already been collected, it is not necessary to obtain additional ethical approval because the data collection process has already been reviewed and approved by an ethics board. The individuals whose data are being analyzed have already given their informed consent for the data to be collected and researchers are not exposing participants to any new risks and are not collecting new data. Therefore, all procedures presented in the manuscript are in full compliance with the ethical standards of the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments. For further information see (ExternalRef removed), (South Africa Demographic and Health survey 2003 [FR206] (dhsprogram.com)) and (South Africa Demographic and Health Survey 2016 [FR337] (dhsprogram.com)).
: Not necessary as the analyses had been conducted with an already existing dataset collected by USAID that is freely available to scientific users.
: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.