10 Sharing your data

Sharing data in some form (reports, visualisations etc) is of course necessary to enable your organisation or others to benefit and learn from your data collection. Of course, sharing the data in the form most relevant to the populations that are the subject of the data collection is also desirable.

In all cases, you should normally define the other stakeholders in preparation for your collection, also to ensure that you require consent from people for the data you wish to share.

Sharing with other actors in the sector is not always natural for NGOs for various reasons, but is of course of great interest in order to avoid several actors doing the same data collection (and therefore leading to fatigue and loss of time for the populations interviewed). By sharing efforts to collect accurate and up-to-date data, it allows for a better knowledge and understanding of the field. Of course, while the benefits of data sharing are many and widely recognised, and the demand for data is high, data sharing must respect the principles of “do no harm” and therefore respect certain restrictions.