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Article History

Received: 1 July 2023

Accepted: 1 December 2023

First Online: 12 December 2023

Declarations

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: The authors confirmed that the research activities and methods were carried out in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and the relevant international guidelines and regulations including GDPR (General data processing regulation), as well as the POPI (Protection of personal information) Act which governs data protection and privacy in South Africa. Ethics approvals were obtained from the respective country national and or institutional ethics review committees. In Malawi, the College of Medicine Research Ethics Committee (ref: P.01/19/2582); and in Ethiopia, Armeur Hansen Research Institute (AHRI) Research Ethics Committee (ref: P011/19) approved the study. For Rwanda, approval was given by both the Ministry of Health Research Committee and National Research Ethics Committee. Ethics approval for South Africa study was obtained from the Human Research Ethics Review Committee (HREC) of the University of Cape Town (ref: 437/2022). Each Citizen Science survey participant was enrolled after voluntarily providing signed or verbal informed consent to participate in the study. Trained research assistants explained the study to each participant using the study information sheet. The data collected were stored in secured repositories approved by the ethics committees of each country. We chose a free and easy-to-use mobile data-gathering platform (EpiCollect) as (ExternalRef removed) which has secured server and storage system that is GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliant [CitationRef removed]. Only data with participants’ personal identifiers carefully removed were shared for joint analysis.

: The individual details, images or videos are not included in this articles, and hence no need for con Consent for publication.

: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.