Building Sustainable Capacity in Health Research through e-Learning in Resource Constrained Countries

Social determinants like income level, nutrition, education, occupation, gender, and poverty influence the health status of individual, resulting in wide disparities in the health status of different socio-economic groups. Efforts to reduce health inequities can be strengthened by incorporating a Social Determinants of Health approach in creating Health Care policy. This will require an increase in the number of scientists in low and middle-income countries, with the necessary skills. This chapter focuses on a novel capacity building approach, adopted by a European Union funded project, entitled “Asian Regional Capacity Development for Research on Social Determinants of Health”. The project uses innovative educational technologies to deliver education and training that would be helpful in building new research training capacity on social determinants of health, in low and middle-income countries. The capacity building approach adopted by the project, will reduce brain drain, is more climate friendly and also encourage gender equity within low and middle-income country-based training.