Current perspectives on global health are largely determined and advocated for by people or institutions in Europe or in the USA. Those determining the questions are not diverse, which results in hegemonic solutions for the entire world. Sometimes, on the basis of the arbitrary and problematic comparative category of income alone, a single generalised solution is recommended […]
Latin America is home to about 800 different Indigenous Peoples and Nationalities, the equivalent to 9·8% of its population. The average infant mortality rate in Indigenous children is 60% higher than that in non-Indigenous children. In 2018, Ecuador reported that 50·6% of its Indigenous population lived in poverty, compared with 20·9% of the non-Indigenous population. Between […]
The NIHR global health research portfolio held a webinar for applicants about ethical dimensions of community engagement and involvement in global health research, in partnership with the Institute of Development Studies. The the speakers for this session are: Dr Bridget Pratt, Senior Research Fellow in the School of Population and Global Health at the University of […]
North-South Power Differentials and Competition in the Research Business Collaborative research is committed to a division of labour. To summarise, two different blocks emerge from the power relationships that characterise the production of knowledge. The first block includes (i) the “donor” who provides the research funding and determines the conditions on how to get access […]
Remunerating Researchers from the Global South: A Source of Academic Prostitution? While researchers from the Global North are granted a guaranteed salary, risk funds, and various forms of insurance, the same cannot be said for research assistants. The remunerative discrepancy between these two groups is a form of discrimination. It creates an imbalance between researchers […]
In a conversation with a friend (a well qualified epidemiologist, who trained at one of the top institutions in the world and is currently based at an institution in Africa), he acknowledged the power imbalances present in global health, describing his position of local research coordinator as a so-called glorified data collector. Through a deep […]
ABSTRACT Drawing on the reflections and discussions from a special session at the 2021 Global Health Bioethics Network summer school, this paper has summarised the key challenges faced by Frontline Workers (FWs) across research sites in Africa and Asia in performing the everyday ‘body work’ entailed in operationalising global health research. Using a ‘body work’ […]
The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a spotlight on existing systemic inequities, both in terms of health inequity and broader socio-economic inequities.1 There have been calls globally not just to build back better but to do so in a way that dismantles structural inequities. Abimbola et al have outlined facets of supremacy, encompassing coloniality, patriarchy, racism, white supremacy and saviourism, […]
To say that we live in turbulent times is a massive understatement. COVID-19 ruthlessly exposes the fault lines of health services and systems, and the responses put in place to prevent its spread or mitigate its effects may affect people more than the actual infection. The outbreak in Wuhan quickly grew to a pandemic that […]
Health research in low-resource settings often involves individuals and populations defined as ‘vulnerable’. There is growing attention in the literature to the ethical dilemmas that frontline research staff face while conducting such research. However, there is little documented as to how research staff might support one another in identifying and handling these dilemmas in different […]