How to (or how not to)…Enhance equity in the conduct of global health research: dimensions and directions for organizations.

Global health research can either challenge or reinforce power imbalances in knowledge production, funding, agenda-setting, authorship, data access, and capacity-building. These inequities are shaped by colonial legacies, funding disparities, extractive partnerships, and Global North dominance over Global South priorities. They manifest in research conduct, procedural ethics, and ethics-in-practice. While much literature focuses on individual or project-level strategies, structural, and institutional dynamics-beyond the control of individual researchers-play a critical role. While macro-level structural change may occur slowly, in line with the pace of societal change, meso-level change within organizations is possible. Research organizations and networks are well positioned to integrate equity and influence broader change. Importantly, the meso-level offers a space to challenge Global North-South binaries and foster a shared ethics-of-practice. We reviewed 255 resources from a live Zotero inventory on equity in global health research, shortlisting 42 and identifying over 135 strategies. These were categorized into domains and organized into 14 action groups, mapped onto a three-stage implementation framework-Preparation, Establishing, and Maintaining-drawing from the literature. Our goal was to distil practices applicable across institutions, recognizing that context and resources shape prioritization. The preparation phase involves assessing current practices, reforming partnerships, and promoting inclusive leadership, with attention to gender equity, community engagement, and institutional self-assessment. The establishing phase emphasizes transparent communication, local and Indigenous participation, diverse recruitment, and culturally responsive research design. The maintaining phase focuses on sustaining equity-focused teams, incentivizing inclusive leadership, supporting under-represented researchers, and formalizing equity policies. Our findings offer a phase-wise typology of organizational reforms to embed equity in conduct of global health research. Advancing these strategies requires institutional commitment and donor engagement across all resource settings. Networked organizations and reflexive designs are key to enabling shared learning and equity-aligned transformation.