Abstract:
There is an increasing effort in the global public health community to strengthen research capacity
in low- and middle-income countries, but there is no consensus on how best to approach such
endeavors. Successful consortia that perform research on HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases
exist, but few papers have been published detailing the challenges faced and lessons learned in
setting up and running a successful research consortium. Drawing on our experience of founding
the African Research Group for Oncology (ARGO), we describe steps and key factors needed to
establish a successful collaborative consortium between researchers from both high- and low-
income countries. In addition, we present challenges we encountered in building our consortium,
and how we managed those challenges. Although our research group is focused primarily on
cancer, many of our lessons learned can be applied more widely in biomedical or public health
research in low-income countries.
