Deconstructing the notion of “global health research partnerships” across Northern and African contexts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Global health conceives the notion of partnership between North and South as central to the foundations of this academic field. Indeed, global health aspires to an equal positioning of Northern and Southern actors. While the notion of partnership may be used to position the field of global health morally, this politicization may mask persisting inequalities in global health. In this paper, we reflect on global health partnerships by revisiting the origins of global health and deconstructing the notion of partnership. We also review promising initiatives that may help to rebalance the relationship. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: Historical accounts are helpful in unpacking the genesis of collaborative research between Northerners and Southerners - particularly those coming from the African continent. In the 1980s, the creation of a scientific hub of working relationships based on material differences created a context that was bound to create tensions between the alleged "partners". Today, partnerships provide assistance to underfunded African research institutions, but this assistance is often tied with hypotheses about program priorities that Northern funders require from their Southern collaborators. African researchers are often unable to lead or contribute substantially to publications for lack of scientific writing skills, for instance. Conversely, academics from African countries report frustrations at not being consulted when the main conceptual issues of a research project are discussed. However, in the name of political correctness, these frustrations are not spoken aloud. Fortunately, initiatives that shift paternalistic programs to formally incorporate a mutually beneficial design at their inception with equal input from all stakeholders are becoming increasingly prominent, especially initiatives involving young researchers. CONCLUSION: Several concrete steps can be undertaken to rethink partnerships. This goes hand in hand with reconceptualizing global health as an academic discipline, mainly through being explicit about past and present inequalities between Northern and Southern universities that this discipline has thus far eluded. Authentic and transformative partnerships are vital to overcome the one-sided nature of many partnerships that can provide a breeding-ground for inequality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.070 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.097 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.030 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.026 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".