Beyond donor and recipient: lessons from a decade-long global health partnership

Global health challenges have become increasingly complex in recent decades, compounded by climate shocks, epidemics and conflicts. As these pressures grow and budgets tighten, the temptation is to opt for short-term, transactional partnerships that characterize traditional donor-recipient relationships.    

This response is short-sighted. Our experience suggests that lasting impact is more often achieved through long-term, co-created partnerships built on mutual learning and locally led research.  

The decade-long partnership between IDRC, a public research funder, and the SickKids Centre for Global Child Health, a pediatric research institution, offers three lessons that can multiply impacts. 

Lesson 1: Co-created partnerships are more adaptive

When initiatives are co-created, partners are no longer in transaction mode; they enter a learning mode that enables the partnership to grow and respond to evolving needs.  

When IDRC began working with the SickKids-led BRANCH Consortium (Bridging Research and Action in Conflict Settings for the Health of Women and Children), supporting explicitly health-related work in conflict settings was new ground for IDRC, but familiar territory for SickKids global health researchers. IDRC, for its part, brought funding, a wide network of local partners and new local research connections. The two partners drew on each other’s expertise and aligned around a shared focus: research on implementing effective health and nutrition interventions for women and children. 

The result? The work produced country-level evidence on delivering those interventions in conflict and fragile settings, and helped fill a major gap in the evidence base.  

A co-created partnership let both sides adapt as the context shifted. Working alongside SickKids and co-funders such as the Gates Foundation and Norad sharpened IDRC’s understanding of fragility and conflict, and fed into IDRC’s research priorities. This proved timely, as IDRC's partners were increasingly working on the same themes in conflict-affected settings.  

Lesson 2: Longevity builds trust

Trust is key and builds over time. Early on, we wanted to make shared decision-making work in practice, moving beyond donor-driven priority setting – questions many funders are still grappling with today but struggle to operationalize.  

About five years in, the partnership had matured to the point where both organizations extended beyond generating research to move into evidence uptake, policy dialogue and new models of long-term funding. A milestone on that journey was a 2020 convening on global health that brought together humanitarian, development and security actors – three key players that rarely come together. Research emerged as the shared entry point across all three. Both partners agreed to explore this nexus further.  

That kind of convening and the research that followed can only happen when both partners are willing to tackle complex issues together. As IDRC’s health programming increasingly encountered projects affected by conflict, including during the 2016-2017 Ebola outbreak, the convening helped deepen understanding of how to operationalize health programming across the humanitarian, development and security nexus. That required trust, and longevity is what built it. 

Lesson 3: Long-term collaborations allow partners to stretch beyond traditional roles

With a solid foundation in place, it created space to explore new areas of collaboration. Informed by IDRC’s sunsetting Think Tank Initiative, which demonstrated that think tanks play a critical role in monitoring progress on the sustainable development goals (SDGs), SickKids moved into a partnership-building role of its own, working with the Aga Khan Foundation Canada to set up think tanks to monitor health and climate-related SDGs in five countries. Ghana, one of the selected countries, saw its successful national model scale across the West and Central African region.  

IDRC's role evolved too, taking on global scoping on the emerging area of climate change and health in collaboration with SickKids. That work helped set new research priorities, including the long-term effects of heat exposure. 

From transaction to transformation

As global health budgets shrink, the pull is toward short, transactional partnerships that look efficient and promise quick results. As funders, we need to think differently. A decade ago, IDRC embarked on what became a long-term, co-created partnership in global health, and it yielded effective and innovative responses to global health problems.  

Long-term global research partnerships are some of Canada’s most durable assets, building trust, strengthening institutions and sustaining collaboration, even in a constantly changing global context. They are not an option to consider only when resources are abundant; they are precisely what is needed when resources are constrained. How we partner matters as much as the issues we address – today’s challenges demand we get the what and the how right.