The Water Sanitation & Hygiene Research & Development (WASH R&D) Centre, formerly known as the Pollution Research Group (PRG) is a transdisciplinary research and development hub based at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in Durban, South Africa. They are a globally recognized sanitation research centre with 50 years of research and development experience and extensive collaborations with international, local, provincial, and municipal partners. Their transdisciplinary research helps identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies, while their innovative approaches work on practical solutions to streamline processes, enhance infrastructure, and optimize resource utilization. They further provide crucial insights into the complexities of sanitation challenges. This involves studying community behaviour, environmental impacts, and technological limitations, as there is no one-for-all solution. In so doing, they guide and inform policy to address these challenges more effectively.
Over the years, the WASH R&D Centre has amassed a significant amount of data on WASH related topics, including data from the Sanitation Engineering Field-Testing (EFT) Platform (2017 to 2023) and the broader research community. This data is currently stored in various locations, such as the university’s network drives, the university’s data repository, the technology developers’ systems and on the personal computers of researchers, without a holistic data management strategy. While open access journal publications from the research are available, the data is not openly published and is not easily accessible to the research community.
openwashdata collaborates with UKZN WASH R&D Centre on phase 2 of our openwashdata project supported by the Open Research Data Program of the ETH Board. UKZN WASH R&D Centre is one of two organisations who will establish a data steward within their organisation whose role is to establish a data management strategy and join a 12-month programme for data stewardship for openwashdata. The full proposal is accessible here: https://openwashdata.org/pages/gallery/proposal-02/