This article is part of a series celebrating the tenth anniversary of The Geneva Learning Foundation.
At 12:40 p.m. Kinshasa time on March 11, 2026, Simon Mukundi Badinenganyi logged into a Zoom call from Kananga, in the Kasaï Central province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
He typed a greeting to the hosts, then added a note: he was in the middle of an intensive catch-up campaign to vaccinate zero-dose children across twelve health zones, the second of three planned rounds.
He did not leave the call.
He stayed for nearly three hours, listening, occasionally typing, while the campaign continued.
Mukundi is what The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) calls a “Scholar.”
He has been one since 2018.
The term refers to any health or humanitarian professional who has completed at least one of the Foundation’s peer learning programs, a portfolio that is set to expand in 2026 to more than 50 courses and programmes.
Founded in Geneva a decade ago, the Foundation has grown into one of the largest networks for community-based health workers in the world, with more than 80,000 participants across over 100 countries.
It sends no trainers to the field.
It connects practitioners so that they can learn from and support each other.
The simple act of connection – at scale – has powerful effects: building competence and confidence that leads to strengthened local action.
On this particular day, the sixth anniversary of the WHO’s declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Foundation had convened its alumni in parallel English and French sessions for a specific purpose: to launch a global call for Ambassadors, on the occasion of its tenth anniversary.
The roll call
The Ambassador title is voluntary.
It carries no salary.
Ambassadors recruit colleagues, share what they have learned, and serve as a visible link between global health strategy and the places where vaccines are actually given.
They do this because they choose to.
They do not do it for the Foundation.
They do it for their colleagues and for the communities they serve.
As of March 2026, 314 Ambassadors have been appointed in five countries, 167 in the DRC, 110 in Nigeria, 20 in Mali, 12 in Uganda, and 5 in Bangladesh.
See the Official Page of The Geneva Learning Foundation Ambassadors.
The event was an invitation to every alumnus, in every country, to join them.
Charlotte Mbuh, the Foundation’s global director and herself an Alumna, opened with a question: “In what year did you take your very first course with the Foundation?”
The answers filled the chat.
Dr. Sidiki Sacko, Mali, 2016.
Erick Kemboka Ngbale, DRC, 2018.
Louise Nkusu Lusangu, connecting from South Africa, 2020.
Pascal Yalala Bushugu, DRC, 2025, and, he added, “proud of it and determined to remain so.”
The timestamps spanned the full decade.
Each one was a point of entry into a community that treats its members as experts in their own right.
What confidence sounds like
Albert Dangijimana, a lecturer at the University of Rwanda’s School of Public Health, joined before 2017, took the World Health Organization’s Survey Scholar course on vaccination coverage surveys, developed and run by TGLF.
Then he went out and conducted one.
In a sector where the default has long been to hire foreign consultants for such work, the sequence is worth pausing on.
Dangijimana now contributes to HPV impact measurement research and advises Rwanda’s national Expanded Programme on Immunization.
He described the change with precision.
“We have been able to face our fear,” he said. “Whenever we are stuck, the network is open, and a lot of experts in the network so that we can interact. Without this, then we could always see people coming from outside to come and do the work in our country. But now we have a local workforce that can really face a challenge.”
From Juba, South Sudan, UNICEF health specialist Unziku Talbert offered the day’s most harrowing account.
He joined the Foundation in 2019.
Immunization coverage in his area was around 70 percent at the time.
By 2023 to 2024, his team had pushed it close to 90.
Then conflict returned.
Health facilities were looted.
Cold chain equipment was destroyed.
“What honestly we managed to achieve is there have been no outbreaks since then,” he said. “But unfortunately, as of yesterday, we got one case of vaccine-derived polio. It is the only one in the last five years.”
Talbert did not describe this as defeat.
He described adaptation.
Through the peer network, he learned about solar-powered Indigo cold chain devices from colleagues in other countries.
By participating in Teach to Reach, he learned about prepositioning vaccines and supplies for three months in areas where access is unpredictable, a technique refined by practitioners in Somalia and northern Uganda during their own conflicts.
“All this learning from colleagues, those years, what they are doing in other countries, how creative colleagues from Somalia were, we learned all from that,” he said.
His request at the end was practical: send him enrollment links for new cohorts so he can pass them to his implementing partners.
The classroom in Kamina
Annie Maloba teaches at a technical medical institute in Kamina, in the Haut-Lomami province of the DRC.
She became a Scholar in 2021, introduced by a colleague in Lubumbashi.
Through the Foundation, she studied neglected tropical diseases and learned about Buruli ulcer, a bacterial skin infection endemic in her region.
She brought it into her curriculum.
“I started to introduce this course into what I am teaching, to try to raise awareness at all levels,” she said. “I saw that there is a bit of change in this area.”
Maloba holds twenty-six Foundation certificates.
In a country where formal continuing education for health workers is scarce and often prohibitively expensive, that portfolio functions as professional capital.
She has also participated in immunization acceleration campaigns.
The knowledge she acquired online now circulates through the students she teaches and the campaigns she joins.
The decorated midwife who will not retire
Amié Kablah Marie, a midwife from Côte d’Ivoire, retired from the civil service in December 2025.
She was decorated as an Officer of the Order of Merit of the Ivorian Civil Service, in part because she made vaccination a principal focus of her midwifery practice, including during the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.
She credited a colleague for introducing her to the Foundation, and the community of Scholars for sustaining her through years of practice.
“Today I am retired,” she said. “But in health, there is no retirement. I am still a Scholar.”
“I am not a doctor”
Bienfait Koko Barhalibirhu joined from Bukavu, in South Kivu.
He is not a health professional.
His organization works in the health sector, and through the Foundation’s leadership training since 2023, he collaborates with doctors and nurses in the area.
“I am sure that currently, in the health zones, there are fewer zero-dose children,” he said.
He also raised a problem.
Telegram, the platform the Foundation uses for its Ambassador community, has become difficult and costly to access in the DRC.
He asked for a WhatsApp group instead.
It was a reminder that the infrastructure of a global network can come undone at the level of a messaging app.
A few voices later, Dieudonné, also from South Kivu, described his province as “currently in a war.”
He joined the Foundation only in 2025.
He has already used what he learned to find zero-dose children in zones of active conflict.
He spoke briefly, his connection dropping in and out, but stayed on the call.
Nigeria’s long game
The English session drew a large and insistent Nigerian contingent.
In 2024, Scholars across the country launched the Nigerian Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030).
Usman Tijani, a 2023 Ambassador who now provides technical assistance to states with poor immunization coverage and consults for the Gates Foundation, said he could no longer count his certificates.
“I was able to invite so many of my colleagues to join as well,” he said.
Umar Abubakar, also a 2023 Ambassador from Kaduna State, reported that many health workers at his ward level in Kakuri Hausa are already Scholars.
“Most of them want to be part of the team, want to run as Ambassadors,” he said, before his connection cut out.
Dr. Ndaeyo Iwot, an elder stateman amongst TGLF Scholars who chairs the Regima Community Care Foundation in Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory, gave the session’s longest testimony.
A Scholar since 2019 and Ambassador since 2023, he described how his foundation was selected to bring out-of-school girls to a presidential immunization launch during Nigeria’s HPV vaccine rollout.
After the event, the girls’ parents received support to send them back to school.
He was also candid about the limits of bottom-up influence.
Dr. Iwot continues to engage the Executive Director of Nigeria’s National Primary Health Care Development Agency about the Foundation through both formal outreach and repeated informal conversations.
“I know that as the time comes, he is going to [respond]” to the more 14,000 Scholars working across the country, Iwot said, “because many of the immunization officers in the national headquarters are on this program. So I know it is a matter of time.”
The discipline of showing up
What the Foundation launched on March 11 is a four-week activation to become an Ambassador.
Prospective Ambassadors write their story, build an action plan with one monthly commitment, recruit at least one colleague, and submit their work for peer review before earning certification.
The first set of Ambassadors from 2023 did not go through the activation, which was first tested in August 2025.
They now need to do so to confirm their appointment.
The program is designed to filter out passive participants.
The Foundation wants people who will take action because they want to. The activation is evidence of intrinsic motivation that leads to receiving the title.
The incentives are not financial.
Active Ambassadors receive priority for scholarship-funded certifications and for paid facilitator positions.
The deeper draw, evident in voice after voice on March 11, is something harder to quantify: the sense that one’s daily experience, in a clinic in Kamina or a ward in Kaduna, has value that extends beyond the walls of that facility.
The Foundation also introduced a framework meant to name what these professionals already do: finding root causes of local problems, building community trust through listening, using local data to make decisions, keeping systems running during crises.
The framework builds on the Manifesto for global health, drafted by more than 1,300 health workers participating in Teach to Reach.
In a sector where a consultant’s slide deck from Geneva can carry more weight than a decade of field practice, the framework is an attempt to make local expertise legible to the institutions that have traditionally overlooked it.
The wider current
Dr. Faiza Rabbani, joining from Pakistan, described how her solo work with zero-dose children gradually drew in her family, friends, and colleagues, who now volunteer in free medical camps.
Gifty Akosua Adzigbey, a nurse and disability inclusion advocate in Ghana, said the network changed her understanding of her own isolation.
“As a woman working in the nursing community, sometimes you might think you are the only one doing something right,” she said. “But then listening to other people just inspires you to do more. I learn every day, even if we do not have any session.”
Gloria Agbo, a Nigerian lab scientist now in the United Kingdom, had drifted from the community after migrating.
The March 11 invitation pulled her back.
“This is an opportunity for me to get back in and see how to go on from here,” she said.
Biamukama Topher, a public health specialist and Ambassador in Uganda, offered numbers.
“I had a dropout rate of more than 10 percent in immunization, but now we are actually below 5,” he said. “The dropout rate has actually moved down.”
No one gave him a per diem for that.
What March 11 means
The date was chosen with intention.
March 11, 2020 was when the pandemic became official.
In April of that year, the Foundation launched its COVID-19 Peer Hub, which grew from 600 to more than 6,000 participants.
That emergency network became the foundation for everything that followed: the Movement for Immunization Agenda in 2021, the full learning cycle deployed across 99 countries in 2022, and the first Ambassador cohorts in 2023.
Now the Foundation has expanded its scope beyond immunization.
A new initiative on malaria, expected to launch around World Malaria Day, will cover innovation in vector control, data quality, and the role of private practitioners.
Ambassadors will be leading mobilization for that effort too.
Thyvan Mande Kipubila, writing from the DRC, put it with the kind of affection that only comes from years inside a community: “The Geneva Learning Foundation is a machine for creating model leaders in vaccination. We owe it a Nobel Prize for vaccination.”
He added a winking emoji.
But the real argument of March 11 was quieter than a Nobel Prize.
It was Simon Mukundi, typing from the middle of a vaccination campaign.
It was Dieudonné, connecting from a province at war.
It was Amié Kablah Marie, retired from the state but not from the work.
It was a question that the global health establishment has been slow to answer: what happens when you treat the people closest to the problem as the people best positioned to solve it?
The Foundation is betting that the answer is already visible, in 314 Ambassadors and 80,000 Scholars, connected by phones and unstable internet, fueled by trust and love for the communities we serve.
The March 11 event was an invitation to make that answer harder to ignore.
References
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