In recent years, the social sciences have experienced calls for greater research transparency and more replicable and reliable analyses. New principles of Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT) have been incorporated in the ethics guide of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in 2012, emphasizing researchers’ “ethical obligation to facilitate the evaluation of their evidence-based knowledge claims through data access, production transparency, and analytic transparency so that their work can be tested or replicated”. Access to data for replication is an increasingly established convention in quantitative social sciences, but for qualitative approaches, the debate over whether, how, and why to practice data sharing is on-going. Almost all provided qualitative data remains unused for secondary analysis. This is unfortunate, as researchers could, by analyzing the archived qualitative data, in principle (1) try to replicate the original findings, and (2) use the shared data for a secondary analysis if they investigate similar research questions as the original study. In this paper, we ask: How can social scientists use archived qualitative data for secondary data analysis? How can secondary data analysis generate fruitful insights from existing qualitative data sources? What information is needed from the original studies for this purpose beyond the raw qualitative materials? Our aims are twofold: (1) Produce an applied pilot study using secondary analysis of qualitative data; (2) formulate draft guidelines for how to employ the secondary data analysis of qualitative data. In line with our own substantive research expertise in security, conflict, and development, we will focus our secondary data analysis on the issue security provision in Sub-Saharan Africa.