Ethical Issues in Academic Global Reproductive Health

This chapter addresses the ethical issues relevant to all academics and academic institutions engaging in global health, with a focus on international experiences in women’s health. The ethical issues for educational and clinical program development, such as sustainability, mutual benefit, and transparency, are relatively new interests. The authors discuss the ethical issues involved with global health research, including funding, community involvement, and informed consent and institutional review boards and argue that sustainability, mutual benefit, and fiscal transparency should be part of formal agreements and memoranda of understanding between academic global health partners; exchanges of learners should be bilateral and equitable; funding should be sustainable and fairly distributed; transcultural and translational issues must be welcomed and valued; research must be ethically grounded because of fundamental disparities between universities in low- and high-income countries; and issues of governance and institutional autonomy must be considered as transnational university partnerships are developed.