How to create ethically responsible partnerships in Global South?

I participated to the African Research Day seminar at the Turku University and the African Academic Night in Turku on 27.‒28.10.2023. The events were organized by FABI network in collaboration with Africa themed Global Networks (GINTL, EDUCase, SAFINET) and Diana ry.  Many inter-disciplinary projects focusing on sustainability issues were presented in both events. Finnpartnership was also sponsoring the African Academic Night, and I was asked to present our Communal Entrepreneurship Education Zambia (Ceezam) -project (LAB 2023) in the event (in the Launch of the Learning Cafe by Finnpartnership).

Discussing challenges

Both events were inspiring, empowering especially women, and much of the speeches were also about struggles against racism and discrimination issues in Finland. Research Day started with the meeting of Global South Network meeting. The term “Global South” has been used to refer to economically disadvantaged nationstates (UniPID 2023, 9). Global North‒Global South academic partnerships are likely to be challenging due to knowledge, resources and power imbalances (UniPID 2023, 9).

The inclusion of Global South partners to the scientific publications was also discussed in the academic events – it is too often that the Global South partners are asked to collect the data, but not included into the analysis of the data nor included as authors in the scientific publications. This is called as helicopter research or parachute science (e.g. Haelewaters et al. 2021).

Challenges related to cultural differences, racism and discrimination issues were also discussed in the African research Day and in the African Academic Night events. For example, why many of the highly skilled and merited academics from Global South countries cannot get positions in the Finnish academy? Currently, Finland is not encouraging these academics to stay here so we lose much of our skilled academics to other European countries or to the USA/Canada.

African academics (especially women and youth) want to see change happening in their communities by disseminating the project results and the knowledge to their local communities. For example, sustainable food systems and food security, health care issues and sustainable technological and educational capacity building projects were presented in the events. All of these can create long-term and meaningful impacts into many of the African societies. Implementation requires commitment, creation of win-win long-term partnerships, trust, transparency and understanding partners´ different cultural, political, social or economical contexts where they live.

New ethical guidelines from UniPID network

Ethical guidelines are especially important when collaborating with African or any other Global South partners. Finnish University Partnership for International Development (UniPID) has just published ethical guidelines for responsible partnerships with the Global South. The report discusses how to counterbalance inherent equalities, emphasizing understanding the contextual factors, how to manage integrity and the various of conflicts of interests and how to shift from knowledge transfer to knowledge(s) in dialogue and from “do no harm” to ethics of care. (UniPID 2023.)

References

Haelewaters, D., Hoffmann, T. A. & Romoro-Olivares, T. A. 2021. Ten simple rules for Global North researchers to stop perpetuating helicopter research in the Global South. Cited 30 Oct 2023. Available at https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009277

LAB. 2023. Yhteisöllisiä yrittäjyyskasvatuksen menetelmiä Sambiaan – communal entrepreneurship education. Project. Cited 13 Oct 2023. Available at https://lab.fi/en/project/yhteisollisia-yrittajyyskasvatuksen-menetelmia-sambiaan-communal-entrepreneurship-education

UniPID. 2023. Ethical guidelines for responsible academic partnerships with the Global South. Finnish University Partnership for International Development. Cited 1 Nov 2023. Available at https://helda.helsinki.fi/items/a2521ede-2fb5-43dd-81c4-4b55a0990355