The Toronto Addis Ababa Academic Collaboration in Nursing: Living the Concept of Counterparts

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. A 2010 Lancet Commission on global higher education for the health professions called for institutional and instructional reforms worldwide in order to keep pace with pressing global health care needs. Among their many recommendations is an awareness of the value of international collaboration to enhance educational quality. In this article, we reflect on our experience of building such a collaboration in nursing. Using the concept of counterparts as articulated by DeSantis (1993; 1995), we describe the highlights as well as the lessons of our work together in developing the research component of the Masters of Science in Nursing (MScN) at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. We extend DeSantis' (1995) emphasis on roles in the relationship for understanding what constitutes success in international collaborations. Beyond identifying roles and responsibilities, our story calls attention to the value of cultivating relationships in which interdependence, mutuality, and issues of reciprocity are at the fore.