Lesson 10. Ethics Review Boards (ERBs)

Ethics Review Boards or Committees are formed to promote and monitor ethics in research.

The text below was taken from Mugumbate, R; Omorogiuwa, T. B. E.; Chikoko, W; Diraditsile, K. (2022). Letter from the African Independent Ethics Committee (AIEC): Advice for institutional ethics committees on process, roles, composition and decolonisation. African Journal of Social Work, 12(2), 59-65.

“Based on data collected in the African Journal of Social Work (AJSW) between 2013 and 2019, most researchers in Africa do not have access to an ethics committee. This leaves a gap in African research, that of inadequate ethics oversight. As such, the African Social Work Network (ASWNet) designed a platform to provide independent ethics advice to researchers – The African Independent Ethics Committee (AIEC). The AIEC was set up initially with a bias towards social work and development disciplines but ultimately, the committee will be enlarged. When fully composed, the membership will include people who work with communities, African cultural experts, social scientists from other disciplines, professionals from other disciplines and lawyers. When fully fledged, the committee will be able to provide full ethics services – advice, approval and follow up. For researchers wanting to or already doing research in Africa, it is important to get ethics advice or ethics approval. This is important so that you protect our communities, and that you also get protected. At times external researchers dump research ethics in Africa, an unethical practice. Others only get ethics approval from an external country and ignore local ethics yet they are very important. The AIEC provides ethics advice internal to African research institutions, organisations and individual researchers including honours, masters and doctoral students, and externally to research institutions, researchers including students outside Africa. This letter will be published three times a year, once in each third of the year. All authors of this letter are the current members of the AIEC. In this first ethics letter, we provide a brief review of literature on African ethics, provide key definitions and advice to ethics on the process of developing committees, roles of stakeholders, composition and decolonising”, Mugumbate et al, 2022.

1. Advice on composition ethics committees

Ethics committees in Africa are usually modelled along western committees but this should change to reflect local contexts. An ethics committee for social science and related research and practice, could have the following members:

1. A community representative who lives in the community
2. A person who works in the community
3. Two African cultural experts
4. One African indigenous leader
5. One spiritual leader (African spirituality, Christian spirituality or Islamic spirituality)
6. A person representing each discipline of researchers in the jurisdiction
7. A legal person
8. A retired scientist or professional from the community
9. An educator from the community
10. A representative of special interest groups
11. Representative of the institution
12. Representative of the faculty
13. Representative of a relevant government department
14. A secretary or administrator of the committee

We recommend that committees are gender balanced. We strongly recommend starting with smaller ethics committees rather than not having one at all.