Collected by university interns under professional supervision, published freely for communities, planners, researchers and donors. Every restored site adds a permanent before/after record.
No systematic, open, community-level environmental dataset exists for Ghana's towns and cities. District Assemblies make planning decisions without knowing where their dump sites are. Development organisations fund projects without knowing where sanitation fails. Researchers study urban environments without access to ground-truth data.
Ghana Data Commons changes that. Using free open-source tools — KoboToolbox for data collection, ODK Collect for field surveys, and OpenStreetMap for mapping — GreenPulse Ghana trains and deploys university interns to systematically collect 13 layers of environmental and community data across Ghanaian towns. All data is quality-checked, formatted and published openly. No paywalls. No restrictions. Ghana's environmental data belongs to Ghana.
All datasets are collected by trained university interns and published freely for communities, planners, researchers and donors.
Remediation
GPS coordinates, area, waste types present, proximity to water and housing, current treatment status.
Remediation
Before/after photographs, treatment summary, handback date, replacement system installed.
Water
Location, flow condition, pollution indicators, seasonal flooding zones.
Water
Community-reported flood zones, seasonal frequency, number of affected structures.
Trees
Species, GPS coordinates, planting date, planter name, growth stage, canopy health.
Land use
Agriculture, forest cover, bare land, built-up areas — change tracked over time.
Health and WASH
Location, physical condition, accessibility rating, gender-separated status.
Health and WASH
GPS, water quality status, ownership, functional or non-functional.
Health and WASH
Type, GPS coordinates, service coverage gaps, hours of operation.
Infrastructure
Location, surface condition, flood damage risk, community access impact.
Social
Level, GPS coordinates, physical condition, sanitation facility status.
Economic
Business type, GPS, estimated employment size — community economic baseline.
Climate
Lit versus unlit road coverage mapped by community for safety and planning.
GreenPulse Ghana partners with Ghanaian universities to recruit and train environmental science, geography and planning students as field data collectors. Each intern cohort receives structured training in the use of KoboToolbox and ODK Collect for data entry, GPS mapping protocols, photographic documentation standards, and community engagement ethics. Data is collected in the field using smartphones, automatically uploaded to secure servers, quality-checked by the GreenPulse Ghana team, and published to OpenStreetMap and our own open data portal.
The internship model serves two purposes simultaneously: it produces high-quality community data at low cost, and it provides Ghanaian planning and geography students with professional field experience that prepares them for careers in urban planning, environmental management and development practice.
Planning officers use dump site locations, road conditions and sanitation data to prioritise infrastructure budgets and development decisions.
Academic researchers in Ghana and internationally use the dataset as ground-truth community data for urban planning, public health and environmental studies.
Development organisations use baseline survey data to design programmes, write grant applications and measure impact over time.
Community members and local leaders use the published maps to advocate for services, report environmental hazards and track the improvement of their own neighbourhoods.
GHS 250 funds one full day of university intern field data collection.
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