About Groundtruths
Groundtruths is a research platform with two sides. People answer surveys and get compensated for their time. Researchers, businesses and organisations get answers from a real, verified sample — instead of from whoever happened to see their link.
The problem we started with
If you have written a final-year thesis in Ghana, you know the routine. You build a Google Form, paste the link into every WhatsApp group you belong to, and wait. Weeks pass. Responses trickle in from friends, coursemates and people being kind — which means your sample is whoever likes you, not whoever represents the people you are studying. Nobody checks whether the answers were given seriously. By submission day you have a dataset you cannot fully defend, and weeks you cannot get back.
The same problem shows up outside the university. Founders decide what to build and what to charge from feedback by their own network. Small businesses cannot afford traditional research, or cannot wait for it. NGOs pay for manual fieldwork that is slow and expensive before a single question is answered.
The obstacle is the same every time: reaching real, relevant people is hard, and knowing whether their answers are honest is harder. That is what we built Groundtruths for.
What we are trying to do
Quality research data should not be limited to whoever can afford a fieldwork agency. And answering honestly should be worth something to the person doing it. Those two ideas are the whole platform.
Where we are going: to become the infrastructure West Africa uses to understand the people it serves — and the most reliable way for ordinary people to be compensated fairly for their perspective.
How we make money
This is worth asking of any site that offers to compensate you, so here is the plain answer.
Researchers and businesses buy credits. When someone completes their survey, those credits fund that person’s compensation, and we take a percentage of the compensation as our fee. That fee is how Groundtruths makes money. The percentage is shown to the researcher before they publish.
Participants pay nothing, ever. There is no membership fee, nothing to unlock, and no charge for redeeming what you received. We do not sell personal data — not to researchers, not to anyone.
What happens to your answers
Your answers are not tied to your name in results. Researchers never receive your personal details.
When a survey opens a researcher’s own external form, your answers go to them and never reach us — and we tell you that before you open it.
What we hold ourselves to
- Truth above all
- We judge design decisions by one test: does this make answers more truthful, or less? A feature that would lift completion rates by encouraging careless answers is not worth it. A feature that would slow down honest answers is not worth it. We are here to get the truth, and we will not compromise on that.
- Fair to both sides
- Researchers deserve data they can rely on. Participants deserve to be compensated promptly and fairly. Where those pull against each other, we resolve it openly rather than quietly favouring whoever pays us.
- West Africa first
- Built for researchers and participants in Ghana and across West Africa, and expanding gradually to other regions.
- Transparent by default
- Both sides can see how the platform works, what the fee is, how compensation is calculated, and what happens to data.
- Better as it grows
- Matching and quality checks improve as more people take part. We would rather ship an honest version now and improve it than promise a finished one.
Who runs Groundtruths
Groundtruths is operated by Groundtruths Ltd.
Email usOur Terms of Service, Privacy notice and Compensation rules set out these commitments in full.