From the Field

Partnerships are built on trust, not introductions

Dr. Katsivo's involvement with a Canada–Africa biomedical research consortium began in 2021, when she was invited to help develop partnerships on the African continent for an emerging research proposal. Drawing on relationships she had cultivated across the continent over decades, she connected Canadian researchers with universities and institutions in several African countries.

For her, that work has never been about making introductions. It is about trust — earned slowly, and visible to the people on the other side of the table.

Through those relationships, research questions were developed around needs that African partners themselves identified, rather than around solutions designed in Canada. The resulting catalyst projects provided the early seed funding and momentum for what became a much larger consortium.

She describes her role as helping researchers ground their ideas in the African context — work that, in her view, asks for humility, reciprocity, time, and a genuine willingness to listen. Her hope is that a wider pool of people will come to work this way, because those are the people who will create change that is actually noticeable.

That commitment long predates any single project. Over more than two decades in the international research enterprise, she has worked to build sustained relationships between Canadian institutions and partners across Africa — relationships that continue to open new opportunities for research, training and collaboration. Now retired from her university post, she continues that work through KPCG, alongside an adjunct research role and her leadership of an equity community of practice for graduate trainees.

Embedding equity in how health technology gets built

Every person — whatever their heritage, whatever they look like, wherever and however they choose to live — has a right to quality healthcare. That conviction is the starting point for Dr. Katsivo's work on equity in health technology.

A rights-based awareness of that kind changes how technology gets made. It calls for equity-focused approaches in the design of health technologies and in how they are finally deployed — not as a review step at the end, but as a discipline carried through the whole process.

It also has to reach the people being trained. That is why she argues for embedding the principles of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Decolonization and Indigeneity across curricula in every training programme connected, directly or indirectly, to healthcare.

She puts that into practice as the creator and lead of an equity community of practice offered to graduate trainees in a Canadian health-equity engineering fellowship, where completing a series of such communities of practice forms part of the trainees' funded programme.