Abstract
In October 2005 the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced an approximately US$450 million sponsorship of 44 innovative projects under the auspices of its Grand Challenges in Global Health (GCGH) initiative. As described in the opening article in this series we serve as an advisory service on ethical social and cultural (ESC) issues for these projects. We are exploring a range of ESC issues identified by the GCGH investigators and independently by developing world key informants in a study published as the second paper in this series. The investigators and key informants placed particular emphasis on the importance of engaging with CSOs in research and therefore we prepared a conceptual paper on this topic which we distributed as a working paper to GCGH investigators and program staff at the 2nd Annual GCGH Meeting held in Washington D. C. in October 2006. This work represents the final version of our analysis. Our article aims to delineate different types of CSOs their role in biomedical research and the advantages and challenges of working with them. We stress that despite the challenges it is in the best interests of science and researchers working in the developing world to identify and engage with CSOs. We also argue that there is a need for empirical research on best practice models of CSO-researcher engagements and for evaluation of these models. (excerpt)
Highlights
Civil society organizations (CSOs) are nonprofit organizations that aim to further the interests of the communities they serve
Sanders and colleagues argue that CSOs are at the forefront of supporting innovations aimed at tackling today’s global public health challenges and that working with them plays a crucial role in making research relevant to communities [1]
The recent termination of tenofovirbased HIV prevention trials in Cambodia, Cameroon, and Nigeria, primarily as a result of pressure from CSOs, underscores the significant impact CSOs can have on biomedical research [5]
Summary
Grand Challenges in Global Health: Engaging Civil Society Organizations in Biomedical Research in Developing Countries. Sanders and colleagues argue that CSOs are at the forefront of supporting innovations aimed at tackling today’s global public health challenges and that working with them plays a crucial role in making research relevant to communities [1]. Similar outcomes have occurred in other countries hosting tenofovir prevention studies, and have complicated potentially promising research on this drug [6,7] The termination of these trials has reinforced the importance of engaging. We stress that despite the challenges, it is in the best interests of science and researchers working in the developing world to identify and engage with CSOs. We argue that there is a need for empirical research on best practice models of CSO–researcher engagements and for evaluation of these models
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