The Global Health Bioethics Network (GHBN) is an international collaborative network focused on ethical questions arising in global health research and practice. It brings together bioethics, research ethics, social science, and community engagement expertise across research institutions in Africa, Asia, Europe, and other collaborating regions.
The network was established in 2012 through a Wellcome Trust strategic award and developed as a partnership involving the Wellcome research programs in Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, Thailand and Vietnam, together with the Ethox Centre at the University of Oxford. Its wider network has also included partners such as the University of Malaya, the University of Ghana, the Ethics Lab at the University of Cape Town, and the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) in Brazil.
GHBN’s work focuses on strengthening the ability of researchers and institutions to recognize, discuss, and address ethical issues in global health research. It combines capacity building, collaborative research, mentoring, ethics advice, and educational activities.
What Is GHBN?
GHBN stands for Global Health Bioethics Network. It is a collaborative platform designed to promote ethical reflection and research in global health.
The network’s three central aims are to:
- Promote and support ethical reflection among partner and collaborating institutions.
- Conduct research into practical ethical issues in global health.
- Build the capacity of researchers and institutions to identify and address ethical questions arising from their work.
Rather than treating bioethics as a purely theoretical discipline, GHBN places considerable emphasis on practical ethical questions that emerge during real research projects and healthcare activities.
These questions can involve relationships between researchers and communities, informed consent, research priorities, health inequalities, clinical trials, data, emerging technologies, and the responsibilities of researchers working across different countries and cultures.
Origins of the Global Health Bioethics Network
The Global Health Bioethics Network was established in 2012 through funding from the Wellcome Trust. The original collaboration connected interdisciplinary ethics and social science teams working within Wellcome’s research programs in Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, Thailand, and Vietnam with researchers at Oxford’s Ethox Centre.
The network developed from the recognition that global health research can raise complex ethical questions that cannot always be addressed by applying general rules alone.
Research carried out across different countries may involve different healthcare systems, cultures, laws, resources, community expectations, and research traditions. Ethical questions therefore need to be examined within their particular social and institutional contexts.
GHBN was created to support this type of context-sensitive ethical reflection while also strengthening local research capacity.
The Role of Bioethics in Global Health
Bioethics examines ethical questions related to health, healthcare, biomedical research, and public health.
In global health, ethical questions can become particularly complex because research frequently involves partnerships between institutions and communities in countries with different resources, regulations, histories, and healthcare systems.
For example, researchers may need to consider how research benefits are distributed, how communities participate in decisions, how informed consent should be obtained, or how research priorities are determined.
The World Health Organization recognizes a broad range of ethical questions in health and public health, including issues involving research involving human participants, healthcare obligations, infectious disease control, and emerging technologies.
GHBN’s work addresses this broader environment by bringing ethical expertise directly into global health research programs.
Building Research Capacity
One of GHBN’s major functions is capacity building.
The network works to develop the skills of researchers and institutions so that ethical questions can be identified and addressed locally rather than relying entirely on external expertise.
Its activities have included annual summer schools, training, mentorship, small research grants, support for doctoral researchers, and postdoctoral opportunities. Over its first decade, GHBN supported more than 40 small-scale research projects in low- and middle-income countries through its peer-reviewed bursary scheme.
Capacity building is important because sustainable global health research requires local expertise.
By supporting researchers based in the regions where research takes place, networks such as GHBN can contribute to the development of long-term institutional knowledge and research leadership.
GHBN Bursary Scheme
The network’s bursary scheme has been an important mechanism for supporting early-career researchers.
Through peer-reviewed small grants, researchers in low- and middle-income countries have been able to develop locally relevant bioethics research projects. The projects can also provide a foundation for larger grant applications or doctoral research.
The scheme combines financial support with mentoring and international collaboration.
This approach recognizes that researchers may need more than funding to develop a successful project. Guidance from experienced researchers, opportunities for collaboration, and exposure to international research networks can all contribute to professional development.
Summer School
The GHBN Summer School is another major part of the network’s capacity-building activities.
The annual program brings researchers and other participants together to examine current issues in global health bioethics, develop research skills, and build professional relationships.
The network’s 14th Annual GHBN Summer School was held in Cape Town in September 2025. Fifty-four participants from 15 countries explored topics including mental health and climate change, bioethics in conflict settings, ethical questions affecting minority groups in medicine, artificial intelligence and ethics, comparative ethical frameworks, and the relationship between empirical and normative bioethics.
The Summer School therefore serves both an educational and networking function.
Ethics Research
Research is one of the three central pillars of GHBN.
The network supports studies examining practical ethical problems arising in global health research and practice. Its collaborative structure allows researchers from different locations and disciplines to work together on questions that may have both local importance and international relevance.
The network has supported research addressing subjects such as clinical trials, migrant health, mental health research, pandemic preparedness, digital health, artificial intelligence, justice, and decolonization in global bioethics.
This research can help identify ethical challenges that may not be fully addressed by existing guidelines or policies.
Empirical Ethics
A particularly important feature of GHBN’s work is its connection to empirical ethics.
Empirical ethics combines empirical research—often involving qualitative or social research—with philosophical ethical analysis. This approach can help researchers understand how ethical issues actually arise in real-world settings while also examining the values and principles involved.
GHBN researchers have used this approach in work involving global health research and responses to infectious disease outbreaks, including the COVID-19 pandemic. A published account of the network describes how its members contributed to COVID-19 research and response while examining ethical issues across diverse research environments.
This approach is useful because ethical problems can look different when examined in practice than they might in purely theoretical discussions.
Ethics Support and Advice
GHBN also provides ethics support and advice to researchers.
One of the network’s approaches has been the use of ethics clinics, where scientists present their research projects and work with ethics specialists to identify and analyze practical ethical questions.
These sessions can help researchers consider ethical issues during the design and implementation of research rather than only after a project has been completed.
The network has also provided ethics training days for researchers and local ethics committees.
This advisory role creates a direct connection between bioethics and scientific research.
Community Engagement
Community engagement is closely connected to global health ethics.
Research involving communities requires consideration of how people are informed, consulted, represented, and involved. Researchers may also need to consider how communities understand research, what benefits they receive, and how research findings are communicated.
GHBN’s wider network includes expertise in community engagement and social science, allowing ethical questions to be examined alongside the perspectives and experiences of communities involved in research.
The network’s approach therefore goes beyond formal research ethics review and considers the broader relationships between researchers, institutions, and communities.
Global Collaboration
International collaboration is fundamental to GHBN.
The network brings together researchers from different countries and disciplines, creating opportunities for shared learning and collaborative research.
Its current network information identifies partnerships across Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, Ghana, and Brazil, among other connections.
This geographic diversity is important because ethical questions in global health cannot always be separated from local circumstances.
Researchers working in different settings can contribute different perspectives on issues such as healthcare access, research priorities, cultural expectations, resource allocation, and community participation.
GHBN and Low- and Middle-Income Countries
A significant part of GHBN’s work has focused on strengthening bioethics research capacity in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
The network’s programs have supported researchers and doctoral students in countries including Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, Vietnam, Ghana, Thailand, Nepal, Cambodia, and Uganda.
This emphasis reflects a broader concern in global health research about ensuring that ethical expertise and research leadership are developed within the countries where health research is conducted.
Supporting locally based researchers can help institutions develop their own long-term capacity to identify and address ethical questions.
Areas of Research
GHBN’s work covers a wide range of topics.
Clinical Research Ethics
Clinical trials and other forms of medical research can raise questions about informed consent, risk, participant protection, benefit sharing, and access to research results.
GHBN supports research and discussion around these practical ethical challenges.
Mental Health Ethics
Mental health research can involve sensitive information and vulnerable populations. Ethical questions can include privacy, consent, stigma, risk, and appropriate engagement with participants.
Migrant Health
Migration creates distinctive ethical challenges involving healthcare access, vulnerability, research participation, and responsibilities toward mobile populations.
Digital Health
The increasing use of digital health technologies creates questions around privacy, data governance, access, algorithmic decision-making, and equity. GHBN identifies digital health ethics as one of its research areas.
Artificial Intelligence
AI is creating new ethical questions in healthcare and research, including questions about responsibility, bias, transparency, decision-making, and the appropriate role of automated systems.
GHBN’s recent educational activities have included discussion of AI ethics and questions surrounding AI-assisted medical decision-making.
Climate and Health
Climate change can affect health systems, disease patterns, access to care, and vulnerable populations. GHBN’s recent Summer School and webinar activities have included discussion of the climate-health relationship.
The Network and the COVID-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic created numerous ethical challenges for global health researchers and policymakers.
Questions arose around research priorities, clinical trials, access to interventions, public health restrictions, data, community engagement, and the fair distribution of resources.
Because GHBN already connected empirical ethics researchers across several countries, its members were able to contribute to research and discussions about ethical challenges during the pandemic. Research published about the network describes how its existing cross-site structure supported empirical ethics work during COVID-19.
The experience also demonstrated the value of maintaining international ethics networks before major health emergencies occur.
Publications and Knowledge Sharing
Knowledge sharing is an important part of GHBN’s activities.
The network provides online resources, research publications, reports, webinars, training materials, and other educational content.
Its activities also contribute to the broader field of global health bioethics by making research and practical experiences available to researchers and institutions beyond the original network.
The network’s website currently hosts resources covering subjects such as benefit sharing, climate-health ethics, research ethics, and other emerging bioethical issues.
African Journal of Bioethics
The wider Global Health Bioethics platform also highlights the African Journal of Bioethics (AJB), a peer-reviewed open-access journal focused on bioethical issues affecting Africa.
The journal aims to encourage discussion of bioethical questions, strengthen standards in experimental and observational research ethics, and support debate around emerging ethical issues on the continent.
This complements GHBN’s broader interest in developing bioethics research and discussion in African settings.
GHBN’s Long-Term Impact
The network celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2022, marking a decade of collaboration and capacity building. Its anniversary materials highlighted the development of bursary fellows, senior fellows, PhD students, and research collaborations across its partner sites.
Over that period, GHBN developed from a partnership focused on strengthening ethics within several Wellcome research programs into a wider collaborative community involving researchers and institutions across multiple regions.
Its long-term contribution is closely connected to its emphasis on local research capacity.
The Importance of Global Health Bioethics
Global health research can produce significant benefits, but it also raises questions about fairness, responsibility, participation, risk, and power.
Ethical research requires consideration of the people and communities involved, the responsibilities of researchers and institutions, and the potential consequences of research decisions.
Networks such as GHBN provide a structure through which researchers can discuss these questions collaboratively.
Its work also demonstrates that bioethics is not limited to reviewing research protocols. It can involve ongoing reflection about how research is designed, how communities participate, how benefits are shared, how evidence is used, and how health interventions affect different groups.
Conclusion
The Global Health Bioethics Network (GHBN) is an international collaboration dedicated to strengthening ethical reflection, research, and capacity in global health. Established in 2012 with support from the Wellcome Trust, the network connects bioethics and social science researchers across research institutions in Africa, Asia, Europe, and other collaborating regions.
Its work is built around three major areas: capacity building, ethics research, and ethics support and advice. Through bursaries, mentorship, doctoral support, Summer Schools, collaborative research, ethics clinics, and training, GHBN helps researchers and institutions develop the skills needed to address complex ethical questions.
Its research covers subjects ranging from clinical trials and mental health to climate change, digital health, artificial intelligence, migrant health, pandemics, and justice in global bioethics.
By connecting researchers across different countries and disciplines, GHBN provides a platform for practical, locally informed, and internationally collaborative approaches to the ethical challenges of global health research and practice.