As for all academic research, global health research projects undertaken as part of international health electives would be scrutinized by ethical committees, minimizing the potential unintended harms to the host community and the student involved. This is in contrast to the all-to-common caricature of fearlessly confident, overly enthusiastic, and culturally-insensitive student tourists disrupting the system and frequently being a risk to patients and themselves [
9]. Even those with insight and the best of intentions may find themselves practising beyond their scope, propagating the idea of poor treatment for the poor and contravening the principle of ‘
Primum non nocere’. An academic partnership between LMIC and HIC institutions offers a means by which the ethical guidelines espoused by the Working Group on Ethics Guidelines for Global Health Training, and General Medical Council requirement that students ‘work within their limits of competence’ can be adhered to [
10]. We propose that bilateral student involvement in these research projects culminating in shared authorship can help alleviate the problem of international health electives being primarily a privilege of HIC students. LMIC counterparts are often not granted the opportunity to partake in electives in HICs due to administrative and financial hurdles and, in terms of research, LMIC collaborators are often unacknowledged in their authorship of publications [
11]. By embedding international health electives into equitable and long-term academic partnerships LMIC students can also be empowered, and even funded, to lead research from their local institutions—helping in a small way to address some of the causes behind ‘brain-drain’ where LMIC students seek to migrate to HICs for perceived career advancement and potential financial advantages [
12]. We envisage that students from both HICs and LMICs will work hand in hand in developing locally relevant project hypotheses, methods, and analyses. Senior academics and clinicians facilitating these partnerships could provide students with technical and mentorship support in planning and conducting research. Nurturing LMIC students’ research capabilities and confidence in such a manner may help combat the paucity of research activity that stems from the absence of research culture and training opportunities [
13].