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

Abstract

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).