Mobilizing Principles for Equitable Global Health Research
How should we create inclusive and equitable global health research (GHR)? What roles and responsibilities do researchers, funders, and collaborators of GHR have in addressing and dismantling unequal power structures in global health research and partnerships? What tools and resources do we need to create and codevelop to conduct global health research in a way that is fair for all people involved? This research seeks to answer all those questions by involving wider global health research community, such as universities, researchers, policymakers, journals, and funders.
Why Focus on this Topic?
It is well established that the unequal distribution of power and resources within nation-states across the globe often creates conditions where disease and illness thrive. These power and resource imbalances between nations are barriers to achieving better global health outcomes. One area where global health disparities are reproduced are in the ways research is conducted between the global South and North. To ameliorate power differences between partnerships within global health research, the Canadian Coalition of Global Health Research (CCGHR) formulated six principles (authentic partnership, inclusion, shared benefits, commitment to the future, responsiveness to cause of inequities, and humility) to encourage all parties to engage in more equitable working relationships. These principles commit global health researchers to learning from each other, with particular focus on perspectives of global South partners. These principles aim to contextualize power and resource imbalances within processes of settler-colonization, mobilize better practices among regional partners, and institutionalize ways to do global health research that are fairer and more just.
How is the Research Done?
We take a system-thinking approach to investigate how the six CCGHR global health principles are operationalized by global partners. Bringing together global health researchers worldwide, we seek to mobilize and institutionalize the CCGHR principles by using a wide array of methods, such as network analysis, group model building, periodic surveys, in-depth interviews, and design thinking workshops, to determine i
What are some potential outputs of the research? [to work on]
- Mapping GHR community globally.
- Obtaining Global South partners’ perspectives on the GHR principles to better position them in the GH research.
- Identifying leverage points to modify the systems.
- Developing tools to achieve equitable global health research.
- Building capacity and resources for equitable health research.
How can you be involved?
You can get involved if you are a member of the global health research community (researchers, trainees, policymakers, journal editors, funders, etc.). Contact us describing your area of interest.