Establishing and sustaining research partnerships in Africa: a case study of the UK-Africa Academic Partnership on Chronic Disease

There has been a growing number of research partnerships between high and low-income regions over the last two decades [1]. The structures of partnerships are dependent on the funding organization, the empirical and geographical focus of the research, the disciplines involved and the research capacity of collaborating institutions or groups. This has led to various permutations involving ‘north-south’ or ‘south-south’ collaborations with ownership centred either within the northern institution, southern institution or shared between both [1-4]. In an era of globalization with increased connectivity between countries and complex developmental challenges, there is a consensus that research partnerships must play an important role in knowledge production and the development of global solutions [1-4]. However, an underlying theme in recent reflections on how research partnerships work is the difficulty of sustaining and scaling up short-term achievements because of complex micro-political (e.g. power struggles between members) and macro political (e.g. the demands of the funding organization) processes [1-3,5]. It has become important to record and reflect on the dynamics of partnerships as a learning process for existing and future partnerships, particularly those situated within or led from low-income and low research capacity countries [1,3,6].In this paper we present a case study of an African-centred north–south research partnership led by a northern institution. The UK-Africa Academic Partnership on Chronic Disease (hereafter the Partnership), was established in 2006 with seed funding from the British Academy. It aimed to address chronic non-communicable diseases (hereafter NCDs or chronic diseases) research, practice and policy for the sub-Saharan African region and for sub-Saharan Africans in Europe.Africa has a complex disease burden. Infectious diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, neglected tropical diseases like onchocerciasis and schistosomia