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Higher education and research are each critical components in current efforts to redesign global health, and in combination form a powerful mechanism to build and develop resilient partnerships.
Global health is going through a major shake-up. The Covid-19 pandemic – as both a global health crisis and a societal disruptor – floodlit major problems and untapped potential for international cooperation, while calling on us to ‘build back better’. However, current geopolitics and upheaval in global structures and financing systems both derails this work and adds acuteness to transformation processes.
From my vantage point – a university-based centre in the north of Europe, collaborating with partners in several African countries in education, research and capacity strengthening – the link between education and research is vital for better global health outcomes. Our work in global health illustrates transversal university cooperation, which the European University Association and the Association of African Universities recently highlighted in a joint statement ahead of the 2025 European Union-African Union Summit.
This summit reinforced the Africa and Europe’s collaborative commitment to reform the global health architecture, with priorities on health security, universal health coverage (UHC), equity and more effective country-led health systems. The two continents’ leaders joint declaration illustrates how this work reaches far beyond the health sector. These ambitions cannot succeed without a strong knowledge ecosystem, and the summit statement concludes that cooperation in higher education and research is a fundamental part of long-term strategic partnerships between Africa and Europe.
Going forward, these higher-level policies will be translated to actions and funding instruments that shape and change practices. Moreover, our ways of working together must change as African leadership and agenda setting is strengthened. In the context of global health research and education, it is therefore useful to remind ourselves of ‘what works’ as we strive to develop, renew and strengthen collaboration between partners in the EU and AU amid global turmoil.
First, developing a stronger research workforce still requires robust higher education and research training. Global perspectives in higher education helps to prepare individuals to take on leadership roles in global healthcare practice and research.
Second, research results need to feed back into the education systems to shape curricula and training programmes for the next generation of clinicians and global health professionals. Circuits between research and higher education facilitate this knowledge transfer. Higher education and research training not only develop scientists, but also the skills needed to generate and translate evidence into policy and practice.
Collaborative partnerships between Europe and Africa imply working over distances. We are all familiar with how challenging this can be. Sometimes just a floor between units that need to collaborate is a challenge for an organisation. Then add in different sets of regulations, routines and practices, as well as layers of differences in languages, cultures and traditions.
But this is where the strength of the academic community can be of immense utility. At its core, academia is an arena for sharing and refining knowledge beyond physical borders. The mechanism that drives this is the very individuals and institutions engaged in collaboration and the search for knowledge, working through trust and mutual respect, and with ease of communication.
Trust, respect, and effective communication develop through interaction over time. Individuals that collaborate in both research and education can double up on interactions, broaden connections and help to transform relationships between individuals into durable relationships between institutions. Project funding is precarious, and collaborating on more than one front can also make institutional collaboration less vulnerable to fickle application outcomes.
Administrative practices on both sides are key to making this work. Practical issues related to mobility, such as visa issues and logistics, to contractual issues, agreements and financial oversight need figuring out. Student and staff mobility can expose basic yet critical issues and create administrative links between partners, links that also facilitate administration for research collaboration.
Beyond practical aspects, tight links between education and research create an open venue for knowledge gap identification, innovation and novel solutions to problems. Discussions around education frequently tap into root problems around what we know and how we can explore our understanding, or lack thereof, with students and experts.
Partnerships in higher education invite lower-threshold elaboration of core problems, similarities, and differences. Where relevant, these can be further developed into research projects. Nurturing a bimodal approach allows education and research to co-evolve, prevents fragmentation and builds up critical thinking. Coupled with practice, such collaborations can also be a good platform to identify needs and priorities from the bottom up and contribute to the aim of strengthened local agenda setting.
Policy design should be informed by a theory of change; what are the steps between the policy and changed actions, and how do we make them happen? In a time where policies tend to be more directional, there is a risk that separate funding streams for research and education move towards narrower aims and a clearer focus on sector specific output.
Research can be tuned towards specific industries, and higher education towards individual graduates. Both are important, but also carry inherent risks of weakening the foundational nexus between higher education and research. At the individual and institutional level, increased specialisation can deprive us of synergies in our work to develop collaboration over distances and over time.
At this intersection, it is therefore important that policy makers keep in mind a theory of change where research and higher education remain intricately linked, mutually stabilizing and contributing to effective partnerships that can take on the major challenges ahead.
Note: This article is based on the author’s contribution to a session on ‘Africa-Europe Research and Education from Policy to Practice: What Works?’ organised by Norcore, the Norwegian Contact Office for Research, Innovation and Education, in Brussels, November 2025.
