Where Does the Time Go? A TDABC Analysis of Informal Pit Latrine Emptying in Mzuzu, Malawi

Capstone project for the Open Wash Data course (ds4owd-002), applying the R tidyverse to a Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing (TDABC) dataset from a doctoral study on informal pit latrine emptying ("gulper") services in Mzuzu, Malawi.

Read the report

📄 View the rendered report (once GitHub Pages is enabled for this repo — see note below)

Or browse the source: docs/index.qmd

Repository structure

• data/raw/ — original, untouched TDABC observation files, one per ridealong session (.csv).
• data/processed/ — cleaned, combined analysis-ready dataset (processed_data.csv), its data dictionary, and a README describing the cleaning process.
• docs/ — the Quarto report (index.qmd), its bibliography (bibliography.bib), and the rendered HTML output once knitted.

Enabling the live report link

This repo's docs/ folder is a standard Quarto output directory. To make the rendered HTML report viewable at a public link (rather than requiring a download):

1. In this repo, go to Settings → Pages.
2. Under Build and deployment → Source, choose Deploy from a branch.
3. Set Branch to main and the folder to /docs, then save.
4. GitHub will publish the contents of docs/ at https://ds4owd-002.github.io/project-PCstumbleine/, which serves docs/index.html as the homepage.

This only needs to be done once; every time docs/index.html is re-rendered and pushed, the live link updates automatically.

Data privacy

Session-level metadata (exact date, location, enumerator identity) is held privately outside this repository. See data/processed/README.md for details.

Author

Padraic Casserly (pcasserly@ethz.ch), ETH Zürich.