Global Health Otherwise shared on LinkedIn:
“Who really controls global health research, and who actually benefits from it?
For years, wealthy countries and their institutions have set the agenda, while researchers and communities in poorer nations stayed on the sidelines.
Ramya Kumar and David McCoy (2026) tackle this imbalance in a new paper for Global Health Action.
They build on earlier work by Kumar and colleagues (2024), who showed that funders control research leadership, decision-making, and benefits far more than anyone admits.
Charani and colleagues (2022) already flagged funders as an overlooked source of power that needs reform.
Kumar and McCoy respond by creating a practical checklist that funding agencies can use to judge their own performance.
The checklist covers six areas: sharing power, prioritizing equity, investing in local research systems, managing conflicts of interest, sharing research benefits fairly, and reporting real impact.
The authors admit the tool has limits.
Without global rules forcing funders to act, real change stays voluntary, and checklists alone cannot fix deep political and economic inequalities in global health.
This paper gives research funders a practical six-area checklist to shift power toward Global South researchers, though the authors admit voluntary adoption limits how much real change it can achieve․”
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