Commentary: Towards digital justice: participatory action research in global digital health

This article from BMJ Global Health makes the case for DHRP’s participatory action research approach:

• The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the rapid growth and financialisation of digital health, benefiting private companies in high-income countries through extractive forms of data mining.

• While a growing number of countries are now developing new digital strategies and policies to fill digital governance gaps, there is little public awareness and input into these processes of policy development.

• New models of knowledge production are required to address these inequalities and empower marginalised groups to know their digital rights in order to advocate for rights-based digital governance.

• The HIV response offers models for this that could be applied more widely: community-led networks of people living with and affected by HIV have translated arcane human rights law, medicine and pharmaceutical knowledge into user-friendly, actionable language, and have used this process to mobilise marginalised groups and have a meaningful say in decision-making.

• While the 2021 United Nations Political Declaration on HIV and AIDS calls for more community-engaged research, such approaches have yet to be applied widely in global health research.

• We present one model of a transnational participatory action research study into digital health for young adults in five countries and reflect on the benefits, challenges and wider implications of this approach.

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