Five Lessons on Global North-Global South Partnerships: A Blueprint for Reciprocity in Research

Philanthropy is increasingly questioning the value of funding Global North institutions to conduct research in Global South countries. The primary critiques of this funding model are that it reinforces problematic North-South power dynamics and can be extractive rather than mutually beneficial. Acknowledging these important challenges, I wanted to share some lessons from my time in philanthropy at the Ford Foundation, as a public interest lawyer during the HIV/AIDS movement, and now as the chair of an academic department at Columbia University, that may be helpful for funders thinking through these difficult questions.

Lesson one: Listen to those on the margins

In the U.S. and around the globe, our most marginalized populations are dying at an alarming rate because no one is listening to them. Women, girls, gender nonconforming people, racial and ethnic minorities, low-income people, and migrants and refugees are routinely excluded from response planning because decision makers and researchers disregard their expertise or think they are “too difficult” to engage with. Yet in my experience as a public interest lawyer in New York City working with low-income folks with HIV, clients had a lot of amazing ideas on how to prevent and address HIV. As a senior program officer at the Ford Foundation, and more recently as an academic at Columbia University, I have come to learn that deep and respectful partnerships are not only possible, but also essential, to sustainable, effective health responses.

Lesson two: Move from expert to interlocutor

Affected communities have the answers, but may need some technical assistance to understand the complex policy quagmire that gave rise to the structural barriers they face. Back in 1992, when we started an advocacy program aimed at training women with HIV on the policies affecting their lives, folks told me I was crazy. These women are sick, they have families, or so the thought went. They will never attend a course. In reality, we had a waiting list for the class within weeks. The women who went through this training ended up on Ryan White councils, federal advisory committees and the like. The landscape for women living with HIV was never the same. We were able to provide the knowledge they needed to understand the sources of discrimination. I saw our skills as vital to strengthening their leadership.

My aim in offering these courses was to move away from the idea of a legal “expert” transferring knowledge to communities. Instead, I served as an interlocutor, helping to translate complex, structural ideas into actionable options for communities, and simultaneously drew on community inputs to shape legal strategies.

Lesson three: Help to bridge the global-local binary

After years of building and running an organization that was designed around the principle of community partnership and leadership, I spent years at the Ford Foundation. Again, I saw that folks at the community level all over the world had answers, but were often unable to access resources or scale up work that really questioned structural drivers of inequality. They faced myriad constraints imposed by donors or multilateral institutions, which often limited their funding of local civil society groups to domestic concerns and were reluctant to fund research looking at complex intersecting factors or addressing issues deemed dangerous by the government partner.

I sought to deliberately challenge this by acknowledging the impact of Global North decision-making on local communities and insisting on amplifying domestic actors in global debates, rather than deferring to larger, Global North-based civil society organizations.

Lesson four: Disrupt geographies of power

When I rejoined Columbia University after many years, I thought long and hard about the appropriate role for a Global North research institution working in the Global South. Many colleagues and activists said that research in the Global South should not, could not, be done by a Global North organization. I set out to prove it could.

One result of that work is the Global Health Justice and Governance Program at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. The multidisciplinary program takes aim at how global health governance affects justice on the ground. By governance, we mean donor rules (think Global Gag Rule), or multilateral institutions’ perceptions of what constitutes evidence (think randomized control trials.) What the Global North does matters in the Global South and we see our role as sorting out what helps and what hinders justice.

Lesson five: Prioritize in-country partnerships

In our recent Global Gag Rule (GGR) research, we partnered with the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) and a service organization, Planned Parenthood Global in Kenya, to study the impact of the GGR, a U.S. policy that denied foreign assistance to any grantee or sub-grantee that provided abortion services or referrals. Participants shared their learning and advocacy priorities related to sexual and reproductive health and rights, provided feedback on the research plan, and encouraged us to consider exploring additional lines of inquiry, collect data in certain countries, and connect with specific community-based organizations prior to commencing interviews.

Approximately a year and a half later, as the in-country researchers in Kenya, Nepal and Madagascar (the other study countries) neared completion of data collection, we convened research partners—APHRC from Kenya, the Center for Research on Environment, Health, and Population Activities (CREHPA) in Nepal, and the Institut National de Sante Publique et Communautaire (INSPC) in Madagascar—along with advocates and activists from each country. The aim was to jointly strategize about how to effectively and appropriately translate research findings into advocacy messages.

The workshop was organized in two parts. The first, open only to researchers, included cross-country sharing of preliminary results and opportunities to co-develop data analysis skills and strategies. In part two, the researchers and activists worked together to begin developing advocacy plans for disseminating and leveraging the study results for national advocacy. We spoke about progress on sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), gaps in policy and practice, and leading sources of opposition in each country’s context, which highlighted differing priorities and problems. Nepal, for example, has an extremely progressive SRHR context on paper, but participants stressed that there has been a delay in developing SRHR-implementing policies and that abortion is still listed under the Criminal Act.

In Nairobi, the Global Health Justice and Governance Program co-sponsored a side event with the Global Fund for Women at The Nairobi Summit, ICPD+25. The side event included panels by our research partners from Kenya, Nepal and Madagascar, and grassroots activist leaders from those countries including the Trust for Indigenous Culture and Health (TICAH) from Kenya. The event was a research opportunity and a chance for advocates to learn from each other and build strategy around sexual and reproductive health and rights in relation to the Global Gag Rule. These discussions generated cross-country and cross-disciplinary learning opportunities—one country’s advocacy “wins,” strategies and barriers offered participants from the other countries new lenses through which to see their own.

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We are in a moment of vast global tumult. Whether considering environmental injustice or COVID vaccine inequity, the inequalities between countries and within countries are vast. It is imperative that donors assess the role of Global North entities conducting research in the South. Partnership is possible if Global North institutions respect the leadership of local entities and focus on the impacts of multilateral systems.

Terry McGovern is Harriet and Robert Heilbrunn Professor, Chair of the Department of Population and Family Health, and Director of the Global Health Justice and Governance Program at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. She previously served as Senior Program Officer in the Gender, Rights and Equality Unit of the Ford Foundation and founding director of the HIV Law Project.

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