Mentorship—A critical metric for career development and advancing global health

Mentorship plays a critical role in promoting career development and generating impactful research and programs, yet it is typically considered an altruistic endeavor and a luxury. Mentorship programs are largely unfunded and unsupported, particularly in the Global South. However, they are important in global health given the high need for mentors in many settings as well as the cross-cultural complexities and power dynamics inherent in the field. Mentor training programs are becoming increasingly available and have been shown to increase traditional metrics of impact—namely, manuscripts, grants, and program milestones. However, the current focus on these metrics without supporting mentorship can detract from their impact, leading to quantity over quality and programs disconnected from the communities they are meant to serve. In this article, we argue that making mentorship itself a metric will facilitate the true impact we seek in global health, while simultaneously promoting equity in opportunity. We describe mechanisms to ensure quality in mentorship and highlight the importance of governmental and non-governmental agencies and philanthropy in enabling institutions to implement mentorship programs. We further describe increasing access to mentorship at scale through digital platforms like The Village, which enables and supports mentor-mentee matches. Elevating mentorship to a core performance indicator will have profound downstream effects for the practice and products of global health.