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TGLF Fellow Panu Saaristo just published an argument for why local leadership is the missing key to humanitarian health. Read the full article: https://www.learning.foundation/2026/07/08/when-the-flood-comes-the-diabetes-does-not-leave-why-local-leadership-is-the-missing-key-to-humanitarian-health/ Somewhere in a flooded district this week, a woman is trying to work out where next week's insulin will come from. She is not thinking about the humanitarian system. She is thinking about whether she will still be here in a month. Noncommunicable diseases already cause around three-quarters of deaths worldwide, and they do not pause for emergencies. Hypertension does not resolve when floodwater enters the clinic, and diabetes does not remit when the supply chain collapses. The medicines needed to treat acute NCD presentations for 10,000 people over three months cost approximately 2,000 dollars. Adding chronic disease management brings the total to around 22,000 dollars. Against the cost of one heart attack

Artificial intelligence for global health: there is a dangerous flaw in WHO's most discussed proposal. Read the full article: https://www.learning.foundation/2026/08/14/artificial-intelligence-for-global-health-a-tragedy-of-the-commons-brewing-in-genevas-basement/ The problem is arithmetic. At 95% accuracy per step, a ten-step agentic workflow lands below 60% end to end. Certifying the output does not fix that. Reading the path does. And reading the path requires exactly the grades WHO's restructuring plan cuts first: a projected 30% reduction in P1-to-P3 posts, the roles where people learn to distinguish a technically correct recommendation from one that is wrong for this district, this season, this population. Reda Sadki, writing in direct response to Rifat Hossain's widely read "The Machine in Geneva's Basement," names what the certification argument misses: the savings from AI adoption are captured now, by the institutions that automate. The cost arrives as a shortage of independent judgment somewhere between 2035 and 2045, long after anyone can be held responsible. Nolan Lovett calls it the tragedy of the cognitive commons. The Validation Tether is its sharpest edge: catching a plausible but wrong answer requires precisely the expertise that AI adoption erodes. Sadki brings to this debate something most commentators do not have: direct operational evidence. 4,300 health workers in Nigeria produced more than 400 root-cause analyses in four weeks, at roughly 90% lower unit cost and seven times faster than conventional technical assistance, and more than half kept collaborating after the funding closed. That is a proof of concept for the kind of institution that can reproduce its own capacity for judgment, at the district level, at scale, without Geneva's budget. For anyone deciding where the next tranche of AI-for-health investment goes, Sadki's test is the one worth applying: not whether a system produces good outputs, but whether the people who will have to overrule it are still being made. Learn more about The Geneva Learning Foundation's AI4Health certificate programme: https://www.learning.foundation/ai

Dear FGS Scholars, A free online training on Female Genital Schistosomiasis (FGS) lesion recognition is now open for registration. This training is not for everyone. Please read the requirements before you apply. (Never heard of FGS? Start learning here: https://www.learning.foundation/fgs) It is offered by Prof. Eyrun Kjetland and the BRIGHT Academy, with support from Oslo University Hospital and the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The training is designed for gynaecologists, medical officers, nurses in cervical cancer screening programmes, and allied health professionals. Recognising FGS lesions requires good eyes and an attentive mind — not advanced English. For French-speaking colleagues, the practical exams and all four theory summary sessions (30 minutes each) are available in French. This is a skill that most of us were never formally taught. You see what you know how to look for. This training changes that. Register using the invitation shared in this community. Confirm participation: brightresearch.cbthr@gmail.com 1) please attach your CV 2) WhatsApp number 3) kindly confirm by 17 August 2026 Price: free

The Geneva Learning Foundation just announced Joseph Wato as its first Fellow for the transformation of global health. Read the full article: https://www.learning.foundation/2026/07/08/joseph-wato-appointed-first-tglf-fellow-for-the-transformation-of-global-health/ "You go to Geneva. You sit in all these meetings. How does that help me?" A mother asked Wato this directly in a village in Cameroon, looking him in the eye. He did not deflect the question. He has spent his entire career building the answer. Wato holds, simultaneously, a board seat at two of the most consequential financing institutions in global health and the daily practice of working with the communities those institutions are meant to serve. Between 2015 and 2017, he supervised community health workers in Cameroon under a malaria Global Fund grant. He went into the field with them, and found families where a child was running a fever and there was no money for transport to a clinic ten kilometers away. By 2020, he had joined the Develo

TGLF's Insights Unit just published a Rapid Gender Analysis of the Colombia earthquake. Read the full analysis: https://www.learning.foundation/2026/08/13/rapid-gender-analysis-colombia-earthquake-10-august-2026/ We could not find an official report on this earthquake that breaks down deaths, injuries, or missing people by sex or age. That gap makes one question hard to answer. Are search, shelter, and medical care reaching women and men equally. In Chocó, traditional midwives are still attending births during the emergency. Their director told a reporter they have no way to transport women to hospital when a birth turns into an emergency. In Cali, part of a hospital collapsed, including its neonatal unit. Staff moved newborns to the car park and improvised a nursery there. Colombia already runs a free national hotline for gender-based violence, Línea 155. We found it mentioned in non-government earthquake messaging, but not in the official updates we reviewed. These are not new problems. They are known risks with tested fixes: fund the midwives directly, post the hotline number everywhere aid is distributed, inspect shelters before people settle in. The analysis lays out what we know, what we could not find, and what to do about both before the response hardens into place.

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A midwife in Senegal lost the roads pregnant women used to reach the health centre, so she found another way to stay reachable. Read the full article: https://www.learning.foundation/2026/08/02/what-did-we-learn-at-teach-to-reach-15/ More than 80,000 frontline health and humanitarian workers met on 2 July 2026 for Teach to Reach 15, the fifteenth edition of the world's largest peer learning event. The Geneva Learning Foundation is publishing six new stories from Senegal, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nepal, Uganda, and Saudi Arabia. In Kolda, floods took the tracks pregnant women used to reach care, and antenatal appointments stopped. In Nairobi, a health promotion coordinator counted a flood differently than a meteorologist, starting with more than 100 dead and following the losses that surfaced weeks later. A nurse in Kasaï central named a sentence from a colleague that quietly undoes a national bed net campaign. A physician gave a room a number, more than 17 doctors dead in the current Bun

New tools for malaria prevention and control are coming. Do you know what they are? Learn more and take the course: https://www.learning.foundation/courses/new-peer-learning-course-malaria-new-tools-to-turn-the-tide/ New vaccines, medicines, antibodies, nets, and tools that target mosquitoes are all here or close. This new certification, from The Geneva Learning Foundation’s Malaria: Turning the tide programme, helps you make sense of each one, then think through what this will mean for your community. If you see malaria in your clinic, your data, or your community, this course is for you. You do not need a science degree to join. You need to know how malaria affects your community.

The Geneva Learning Foundation just published the origin story behind its new Leadership framework, grounded in the experience of more than 1,300 people who work for health. Read the full article: https://www.learning.foundation/2026/08/03/tglfs-leadership-framework-who-stands-behind-it/ In September 2023, 390 health leaders met online to review a draft Manifesto for global health. Most work for ministries of health in districts and facilities, across more than eighty countries. No international consultants, no global health agencies, and no donors were present. That absence is the founding gesture of the entire framework. In the ordinary architecture of global health, a competency framework is written by experts and carried outward for others to adapt. That room reversed the direction. The people usually positioned as recipients of knowledge became its authors and validators. The framework calls itself a missing curriculum. Standard competency models in global health concentrate on clinical skills a

The Geneva Learning Foundation just published an analysis comparing its new Leadership framework with the World Health Organization's curriculum guide for community health workers. Read the full article: https://www.learning.foundation/2026/08/03/community-health-workers-how-tglfs-leadership-framework-strengthens-the-world-health-organizations-existing-guidance/ Both documents use the same words: domains, behaviours, proficiency levels. The difference is not in the vocabulary. It is in where each document locates the source of its content. The WHO guide derives its competencies from a global evidence base, refined by a technical advisory group, then adapted in the field. The Foundation's framework reverses that flow. Its competencies come first from the testimony of about 1,300 frontline workers and a decade of observed practice, translated into standard language afterward. In one, local knowledge is what gets adapted to. In the other, local knowledge is what the framework is made of. The WHO guide i

217 out of 258 field stories describe a pharmacy, street seller, traditional healer, or health hut visited before the health centre. Read the full article: https://www.learning.foundation/2026/08/06/replay-teach-to-reach-16/ That is not a knowledge gap. That is the finding 258 health workers from 24 countries documented in the Geneva Learning Foundation's first peer learning course on malaria, "Malaria: Turning the Tide." Their most uncomfortable discovery: a bed net used for fishing is not ignorance. It is a choice between eating today and sleeping safely tonight. These 258 participants shared 1,534 field stories from 59 regions and 110 health zones. They exchanged 4,133 messages. Their accounts cite 16,731 verified references. No classroom course gives back findings in that form. In Guinea, one health worker moved from inspection to ongoing training, and referral of severe cases improved. A follow-up phone call after distribution turns a net someone owns into a net that gets used.

24,610 health workers shared what they are already doing in respond to the harmful effects of climate change on health. Learn from them: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-you-can-do-climate-change-harming-your-wx9lf/ Habila Christiana Habu, Community health worker, Ministry of Health, Taraba State, Nigeria: “We organized mobile health clinics, using boats to reach stranded communities. These boats were borrowed from local fishermen, who generously offered their assistance. We prioritized essential services, such as immunizations, antenatal care, and treatment for common illnesses like malaria and diarrhea.”

The Geneva Learning Foundation just published a Leadership framework built from the collective experience of more than 1,300 people who work for health. Read the full article: https://www.learning.foundation/2026/08/03/tglf-leadership-framework/ A health worker has more to do this week than the week has hours. The list only gets longer. She already has plans. What she needs is a way to make them happen, and to make them work for her community. In 2023, The Geneva Learning Foundation published the Manifesto for global health, drafted with input from more than 1,300 people who work for health. The new Leadership framework builds on that collective experience. It helps a health worker figure out where she stands as a leader, and chart her path to lead better for her community. The framework has two parts. Nine domains name what she does: adaptive leadership, community trust, digital skills, resource mobilization, climate and One Health, humanitarian protection, psychosocial leadership, networked learnin

TGLF Scholar Newsletter Issue 6 (EN)

TGLF Scholar Newsletter Issue 6 (EN)

The Geneva Learning Foundation just published a new tool for health workers who carry climate emergencies alone. Read the full article: https://www.learning.foundation/2026/08/03/7-30-climate-health-emergency-framework/ When the road floods, a health worker finds another way to reach a woman in labour. When the heat rises, she changes her clinic hours. When the rains fail and children arrive hungry, she acts with what she has. She does this unpaid, often without being reimbursed for transport or airtime. The new 7-30 CHEF, the Climate Health Emergency Framework, gives that work a shape. It sorts a climate emergency into three phases built around two numbers a health worker can hold in her head under pressure. The 7 covers the seven days after a warning, when risks are reviewed and roles are clear. The 30 covers the thirty days after an event starts, when services stabilize and one lesson is recorded for next time. Response is what happens in between, starting when the situation demands it, not on a f

24,610 health workers shared what they are already doing in respond to the harmful effects of climate change on health. Learn from them: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-you-can-do-climate-change-harming-your-wx9lf/ Maiga Nana Jacqueline, Midwife, Ministry of Health, Fada District, Burkina Faso: "Some roads are impassable during the winter months, making healthcare inaccessible. To remedy this, village midwives from these communities have been trained to assist in childbirth. This state of affairs is all the more satisfying in that hygienic deliveries are taking place without complications."

A question without a network. A course without experience. A network without action. Read the full article: https://redasadki.me/2026/05/30/teach-to-reach-a-question-without-a-network/ The format looked modest. A handful of co-facilitators. Scholars from across the network. Teach to Reach is the largest peer learning platform for health and humanitarian workers. This is the final article (4 of 4) from the 14 May 2026 session.

24,610 health workers shared what they are already doing in respond to the harmful effects of climate change on health. Learn from them: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-you-can-do-climate-change-harming-your-wx9lf/ Konan Kouamé Georges, Public health medical doctor, Ministry of Health, Yopougon Health District, Côte d'Ivoire: "The rainy season led us to observe a dengue epidemic in 2023. Epidemiological surveillance has been stepped up, with dengue and malaria rapid tests being carried out on suspected cases and data being transmitted on a daily basis instead of on a weekly basis."