Advancing equitable global health research partnerships in Africa

### Summary box > If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. > —African proverb Many global health partnerships involve collaborations between investigators from Africa and the West. Although such partnerships have produced numerous important advances, such as vaccine development and treatments for HIV/AIDS, they are largely imbalanced. Western investigators generally formulate the research questions, design the studies, obtain the funding, conduct the analyses and present the findings in conferences held in the West and publish the findings in journals that are often unavailable for Africans. African investigators typically collect the data and have limited opportunities to make intellectual contributions to the process.1 This situation raises fundamental questions about the goals and products of global health research partnerships. In this article, we explore the root causes of the imbalance and propose strategies to formulate equitable global health research partnerships; our comments reflect the experiences of both African and Western researchers. We believe this discussion is especially relevant now because of growing interest and investment in global health, as well as rising discontent among African scientists.2 Moreover, this inequity is often not openly discussed among research partners1 and inadequate attention has …