Guiding principles for quality, ethical standards and ongoing learning in implementation research: multicountry learnings from participatory action research to strengthen health systems

Participatory action research (PAR) is a community-based research process where academic researchers and researchers from the community work together to understand challenges, co-create solutions and advocate for change based on core principles that typically include respect for diversity, community strengths, reflection of cultural identities, power-sharing and co-learning.

This paper captures learnings about the PAR process from a cross-country study in Nigeria and Liberia which involved 20 interviews with co-researchers from neglected tropical disease (NTD) programmes (at the national and sub-national levels) and academic researchers. The authors present evidence for five additional principles related to quality, ethical standards and ongoing learning to support high quality, ethical PAR to address implementation challenges for health systems strengthening.