Innovative Academic Cooperations: Partnerships to Improve Health

Germany's increased engagement in global health builds on many years of experience in bilateral and multilateral activities in health.

German Government's global health strategy (2020) describes Germany`s commitment and expertise to current challenges. Within global health, now many activities are observed with regard to academic partnerships as well.

However, compared to neighboring European countries, Germany has few structures and qualified scientific personnel in the field of global child health. This makes it systematically and scientifically difficult to adress relevant issues. Partnership-based research and teaching oriented towards the needs of resource-poor countries is limited and to date there is no institute for global child health in Germany.

In the political sphere, there is currently a partnership focus on Africa – also in the area of health. Especially in countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, the greatest burden of disease currently lies with children.

There is a need of partnerships that jointly strengthen good clinical research as well as teaching and training of local health workers, thereby also improve the long-term health of vulnerable groups such as children.
For these reasons, we are using child health as an example in our session to shed light on the success of academic cooperation in general.

The speakers will present various models of innovative academic cooperation between German institutions and their partners in resource-poor countries. Our discussion focuses on needs in the partner countries, sustainability, and improving the health of vulnerable groups through the academic partnerships.