03 · What You Need to Know
Equitable Partnerships Are Built Across the Entire Research Lifecycle
Start With the Research Agenda, Not the Subcontract
A partnership is already constrained if researchers in one setting design the study, obtain the funding, finalize the methods, and then search for a “local partner” to implement it.
The Cape Town Statement recommends that research priority and agenda-setting include all research partners and specifically cautions against imposing high-income-country research agendas on collaborators in low- and middle-income countries. The TRUST Code similarly states that local relevance should be determined collaboratively with local partners.
Early participation matters because whoever frames the research question determines much of what follows: which knowledge counts, what outcomes matter, what expertise is needed, and who is positioned as an intellectual leader.
Equity Is Not the Same as Equality
Two institutions can have an equitable relationship without receiving identical amounts of money or making identical contributions.
A laboratory-intensive analysis may legitimately require substantial expenditure at one institution. Fieldwork may require more staffing at another. One partner may contribute specialized equipment while another contributes decades of contextual expertise and relationships.
The question is whether the allocation is defensible and sufficient, not whether every column in the budget matches.
Equality
Partners receive or contribute the same amount or are treated identically.
Equity
Resources, opportunities, influence, responsibilities, and benefits are allocated fairly while accounting for different contributions, needs, constraints, and starting positions.
Budget Equity Includes Indirect and Hidden Costs
Local institutions need more than money for enumerators or participant recruitment. Research also consumes finance staff time, offices, internet, utilities, administration, ethics oversight, data management, equipment maintenance, institutional leadership, and other infrastructure.
If one institution receives generous indirect costs while another is funded only for visible field expenses, the second institution may effectively subsidize the collaboration.
The Cape Town Statement specifically identifies unfair indirect-cost allocations to institutions in low- and middle-income countries as a practice funders should avoid. WHO-hosted ESSENCE and UKCDR guidance similarly emphasizes that equitable partnerships require attention to structural mechanisms such as funding procedures and contractual conditions as well as trust and respect.
Leadership Should Reflect Expertise, Not Only Grant Administration
The institution that administers the grant does not automatically possess the greatest scientific expertise in every part of the project.
Equitable governance can distribute leadership according to relevant expertise. A local investigator might lead community engagement, qualitative analysis, epidemiology, policy translation, or the entire study. Another institution might lead laboratory analysis or data infrastructure.
Leadership can therefore be plural. What matters is that important scientific and strategic decisions are not monopolized merely because one partner controls the funds.
Local Researchers Should Participate in Intellectual Work
The TRUST Code states that local researchers should, wherever possible, be included throughout the research process, including study design, implementation, data ownership, intellectual property, and authorship.
This is important because equity cannot be achieved if researchers in lower-resource settings are structurally confined to recruitment and data collection while analysis, interpretation, writing, and theoretical development remain elsewhere.
Local contextual expertise is itself intellectual expertise. It can affect whether measures are valid, whether results are interpreted correctly, and whether conclusions make sense in the setting from which the data came.
Authorship Equity Starts Before the Manuscript
Waiting until a paper is drafted to discuss authorship is often too late. By then, opportunities to make qualifying intellectual contributions may already have been distributed unequally.
Partners should discuss publication plans, leadership opportunities, authorship criteria, writing responsibilities, and support needs early enough for people to contribute meaningfully.
The Cape Town Statement places fair attribution within research integrity and calls for attention to diversity, inclusion, and appropriate acknowledgement of research stakeholders.
Equity does not mean giving authorship regardless of contribution. It means avoiding a project structure in which some partners are denied the opportunity to make the contributions that authorship recognizes.
Data Governance Should Be Negotiated Before Data Exist
Who stores the dataset? Who can access it? Who approves secondary analyses? Can local investigators use the data for student projects? What happens after the grant ends? Can samples be exported? Who decides whether they can be reused?
These questions become much harder when the data have already been transferred to the better-resourced institution.
The TRUST Code explicitly includes data ownership and intellectual property among areas in which local researchers should be included. Equitable partnerships should establish appropriate arrangements for control of internationally collected data and samples before collection or transfer occurs.
Capacity Strengthening Should Respond to Locally Identified Priorities
Research capacity strengthening can involve mentoring, infrastructure, research management, laboratories, statistical skills, grant development, doctoral training, ethics systems, data management, or other needs.
But capacity strengthening becomes paternalistic when the better-resourced partner decides unilaterally what the other institution supposedly lacks.
WHO-hosted ESSENCE guidance emphasizes research capacity strengthening as a systematic process and encourages funders to design it around evidence, local needs, sustainable systems, and equitable opportunities. The goal should be greater long-term ability to conduct and lead research, not permanent dependence on an external partner.
Watch Out
A partnership is not equitable merely because it contains a “capacity-building component.” Ask who identified the capacity priorities, whose capacity is assumed to need strengthening, whether learning flows in both directions, and whether the collaboration leaves local institutions better able to lead future research independently.
Expertise Flows in More Than One Direction
The language of capacity building can imply that knowledge flows from a sophisticated institution to a deficient one. International collaborations are usually more complicated.
Researchers in lower-resource settings may contribute expertise in diseases, communities, implementation, field methods, policy systems, languages, environmental conditions, or research contexts that their overseas partners lack.
WHO has highlighted calls to think in terms of “capacity sharing” as a way of recognizing this two-way ecosystem. The terminology itself does not create equity, but the underlying point matters: every institution enters a partnership with capacities and gaps.
Contracts Should Not Quietly Undo the Partnership’s Principles
Researchers can agree verbally that a project is collaborative while the formal contract gives one institution unilateral control over funds, termination, intellectual property, publication approval, data access, or future use.
WHO-hosted guidance on equitable partnerships stresses the importance of contractual and funding arrangements alongside relational trust. Researchers should therefore examine the agreement itself rather than relying solely on statements of partnership values.
Institutions with less legal or administrative capacity may also need adequate support to negotiate complex international agreements fairly.
Communities Are Partners in the Ethics of Equity Too
Equity among universities does not exhaust the ethical problem. Participants and communities may supply data, samples, knowledge, time, and trust without appearing on partnership governance charts.
The TRUST Code calls for local communities and research participants to be included throughout the research process where possible and requires findings to be returned in a meaningful, appropriate, and understandable form.
CIOMS likewise requires research in low-resource settings to create local social value and calls for efforts to make resulting interventions, products, and knowledge available to the population or community involved.
Equity Includes What Happens After Funding Ends
A short grant can create a long relationship. Equipment needs maintenance. Staff contracts end. Data remain valuable. Publications continue. Communities may expect results. Early-career researchers may still need mentorship. New grants may build on the original collaboration.
Partnership agreements should therefore consider post-project responsibilities rather than assuming that equity ends on the grant closing date.
This connects directly to researchers’ responsibilities to communities after an international project ends.
Equity Should Increase Agency Over Time
One useful long-term test is whether the partnership expands the ability of all partners to initiate, lead, fund, analyze, publish, and govern future research.
If ten years of collaboration still requires the same institution to originate every proposal, control every dataset, and serve as principal investigator on every grant, repeated “capacity building” deserves closer examination.
Equitable collaboration should not institutionalize dependency as its business model.
