Empowering Meaningful Community Engagement and Involvement in Global Health Research: Critical Reflections and Guiding Questions

When the first NIHR Resource Guide on Community Engagement and Involvement (CEI) was published in 2019, the world was as yet untransformed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, it is even clearer that global health goals are unachievable without strong relationships of trust between researchers, practitioners and the communities with whom they work (1-4). COVID-19 has also brought to the fore the importance of bringing diverse forms of knowledge to bear on complex public/ global health challenges (5-8). In addition, the increased calls to build genuine equitable partnerships in global health research (9-11) have underscored the fact that meaningful community engagement and involvement is not only an ethical imperative of ‘building forward differently’ (6), but also a means through which global health researchers can be more accountable to those whose lives they seek to improve (12).