Highlights 1400 poor households in two major African cities were interviewed during lockdowns. The lockdown had a high economic impact in Ghana. In South Africa, COVID-19 had an adverse impact on the urban poor’s mental health. Lack of information was an issue, while misinformation appeared to be limited. Stricter regulations do not always lead to higher compliance with social distancing.

Ethics in social science experimentation and data collection are often discussed but rarely articulated in writing as part of research outputs. Although papers typically reference human subjects research approvals from relevant institutional review boards, most recognize that such boards do not carry out comprehensive ethical assessments. We propose a structured ethics appendix to provide details on the following: policy equipoise, role of the researcher, potential harms to participants and nonparticipants, conflicts of interest, intellectual freedom, feedback to participants, and foreseeable misuse of research results. We discuss each of these and some of the norms and challenging situations of each. We believe that discussing such issues explicitly in appendices of papers, even if briefly, will serve two purposes: more complete communication of ethics can improve discussions of papers and can clarify and improve the norms themselves.

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