Embed Capacity Development Within All Global Health Research

### Summary box\n\nGlobal health research is expanding.1 New global health institutions appear in the North, sometimes by relabelling existing entities. Global health journals have been born, and funding schemes with this focus have increased. However, there are insufficient local competencies for research in low-income countries. The capabilities for problem-solving are growing too slowly to close the existing North–South capacity gap.2 Local problems and contexts are not sufficiently taken into account,3 and there is a continued dependency on institutions in the Global North.4 In this commentary, we aim to draw attention to the opportunity for capacity development within international collaboration for global health research. We illustrate this with examples of two collaborative projects in sub-Saharan Africa, where mutual capacity development was embedded as an integral part of the project.\n\nA review of health research capacity development identified a range of strategies but a lack of robust evaluation that resulted in unclear effectiveness and weak learning.5 Only a few global health funders systematically allocate resources to research capacity development.6 Power relations between collaborating partners from the Global North and Global South continue to lead to unfair ownership of data, unfair authorship and other problems that together have been labelled a neocolonialist model of capacity building.6 …