The Social Determinants of Health Network (SDH-Net) is a four-year (2011-2015) collaboration project financed by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Research Program. The SDH-Net project aims at strengthening research capacities for health and its social determinants in African and Latin American low and middle-income countries in close collaboration with European partners.  COHRED and institutions from Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, South Africa, Tanzania and Kenya form the consortium that is carrying out the project.

With the intention of capturing the full complexity of capacity building in research on SDH, the SDH-Net project has embraced a comprehensive and systemic analysis of the status of research capacities on SDH in Latin America and Africa by looking specifically at six partner countries, namely Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, and Kenya, South Africa, and Tanzania. The results of this analysis are the basis of a strategic approach articulated around four research capacity areas: knowledge production, research implementation, research system governance and management, and research system performance, and that brings forward the capacity deficiencies that need to be tackled to improve research on SDH at individual, institutional and national levels. For operational purposes these capacity areas have been reformulated into three ‘capacity building landscapes’: social appropriation of knowledge, institutional and national research infrastructure, and research skills and training/networks, that currently guide the development of capacity building actions to be implemented in the analysed countries.