Collaborative Data Sovereignty is an approach to health research in which data remain under the stewardship of the institutions and countries that generate them, while still supporting multi-site and global collaboration.
The current research ecosystem often relies on transferring data to central locations for storage, management, and analysis. While this enables collaboration, it can also concentrate analytical capability and governance away from the settings where data are generated. In contrast, a collaborative sovereignty model combines local data stewardship, trusted governance frameworks, secure infrastructure, and federated analytical approaches that bring analysis to the data rather than moving data to the analyst.
This model is important because it aligns research collaboration with long-term capacity strengthening. When data remain local, institutions require the systems, governance structures, infrastructure, and analytical expertise needed to manage and derive value from their own data. Over time, this supports sustainable research capability, local scientific leadership, and greater resilience within health systems.
Advances in federated analytics, privacy-preserving computation, and federated machine learning now make collaborative data sovereignty technically feasible at scale. These approaches have the potential to accelerate evidence generation, support trustworthy AI development, and enable participation in international research while maintaining local control of data assets.
The Global Health Network is developing tools, training, implementation guidance, and communities of practice to support the adoption of collaborative data sovereignty approaches across diverse research settings. This work spans governance, data management, federated analysis, workforce development, and AI-enabled research systems.
Read more here: https://www.bmj.com/content/393/bmj-2026-372314
If you are interested in contributing to this area, joining the community of practice, or participating in the Collaborative Data Sovereignty Task Force, please get in touch by emailing data@theglobalhealthnetwork.org.