Surveys, assessments and routine monitoring have become faster and cheaper thanks to smartphones and cloud platforms, but regulation has tightened at the same pace. Data protection laws, institutional review requirements, donor safeguarding rules and national statistics regulations all affect who may collect what, from whom and how it must be stored and shared. Teams that treat these as an afterthought risk delayed approvals, breached confidentiality and findings that cannot be defended.

The Policy and Regulatory Frameworks for Data Collection, Survey Design & Mobile Tools Training Course is aimed at people who must govern as well as run data collection. It begins with the legal and ethical landscape: data protection principles, consent models, anonymisation and pseudonymisation, retention rules, research ethics review and special protection for children, refugees and other vulnerable groups. It then moves through survey methodology, covering objectives, indicators, sampling approaches, questionnaire structure, wording, translation and pretesting. The final sessions turn to mobile data collection, including form design, skip logic, validation, device management, encryption, server hosting choices, access control, data cleaning and handover.

Participants build a data collection protocol, a consent statement and a working mobile form as they go, and they test their forms in a short field simulation. The course concludes with a policy and risk review of each protocol by peers.

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

• Interpret data protection principles, consent requirements and research ethics expectations for field data collection.
• Complete a data protection impact assessment and define retention and sharing rules.
• Design survey objectives, indicators and sampling approaches suited to the study question.
• Write clear, unbiased questionnaires and test them through piloting.
• Build and deploy mobile forms with validation, skip logic and offline capability.
• Configure encryption, user roles and secure storage on mobile data platforms.
• Draft protocols, data sharing agreements and enumerator codes of conduct.
• Apply quality assurance routines during and after fieldwork.

The programme is intended for professionals who plan, approve or run data collection, including:

• Monitoring, evaluation and learning managers
• Research and survey coordinators
• Data protection and privacy officers
• National statistics office staff and government analysts
• Programme managers in NGOs and development agencies
• Information management officers in humanitarian operations
• Academic researchers and ethics committee members
• Data managers and field supervisors using mobile tools

Participants complete the course with:

• A data collection protocol that covers consent, risk and quality control.
• A data protection impact assessment completed for a real project.
• A tested questionnaire with sampling plan and pretest notes.
• A working mobile form built and deployed on a chosen platform.
• Template consent statements and data sharing agreements.
• A checklist of security settings for devices, servers and users.

The course balances regulation with hands-on tool work, using:

• Short legal and ethics briefings with practical interpretation
• Template-based drafting of protocols, consent forms and impact assessments
• Computer labs on KoboToolbox, ODK and CommCare form building
• A short field simulation to test forms and enumerator procedures
• Peer review panels that challenge each protocol

Participants who complete all five days, the lab work and the protocol exercise receive a CPD-accredited Certificate of Completion issued by Vision Reach Global Consultancy.