Panu Saaristo is our first Fellow for humanitarian health
We are pleased to announce that Panu Saaristo has accepted our invitation to become the First Fellow for Humanitarian Health of The Geneva Learning Foundation.
The title is thematic rather than honorific. TGLF Fellowships sit inside specific fields of practice, and humanitarian health is a field in its own right. It pulls together emergency response, clinical practice, epidemic control, climate adaptation, and the daily work of reaching people who need care in the places where care is hardest to deliver. Naming Panu as our first Fellow in this domain signals TGLF’s commitment to build depth of thinking and practice in humanitarian health, alongside one of the people who has shaped it.
Twenty years at the intersection of community, knowledge, and action
Panu Saaristo spent two decades at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).
He joined IFRC in 2006 with field deployments in Latin America and the Caribbean. In January 2010, when the earthquake in Haiti killed more than 200,000 people, he served as field coordinator of the Red Cross network’s emergency health response, translating global health frameworks into operational decisions in a country where the health system had effectively ceased to exist. Within weeks, his team ran one of the first large-scale mobile health information campaigns in disaster response history. They sent more than seven million text messages to 1.2 million people with guidance on vaccination, diarrhoea prevention, and disease control.
If you cannot reach people with knowledge when they need it most, the knowledge does not exist for them.
He went on to lead emergency health at IFRC headquarters in Geneva, with responsibility for preparedness, epidemic response, Emergency Medical Team deployment, and global health standards. He held the title of Emergency Health Coordinator, served as Acting Director, and represented IFRC for emergency health with governments, donors, UN agencies, and academic institutions. Across nearly every type of health emergency – including the Ebola virus disease epidemics and the COVID-19 pandemic – he and his team coordinated the global response in support of the Red Cross Red Crescent network. He taught National Society emergency health staff and public health students at several universities, and presented at global conferences such as the World Congress on Disaster and Emergency Medicine and the International Council of Nurses Congress.
At the IFRC Regional Office for Europe in Budapest, he served as Regional Manager and Thematic Lead for Health and Care. That meant he held technical oversight responsibility for health programming across 54 National Societies in Europe and Central Asia. In 2023, when a heatwave killed more than 47,000 people across Europe, he was tasked with speaking on the health consequences of climate. At a UN press briefing in Geneva, he said: “Heat waves are really an invisible killer. We are experiencing hotter and hotter temperatures for longer stretches of time every single summer here in Europe.”
He is also a scholar. He holds a Certificate in Humanitarian Assistance from Uppsala University, a Master of Science in Disaster Relief Healthcare from Ulster University, and an Executive MBA from the University of Geneva. He is currently completing a Doctorate in Business Administration. His peer-reviewed publication record includes work on epidemic response in Zimbabwe and Haiti, nursing leadership during the Ebola crisis in West Africa, operational management of non-communicable diseases in humanitarian settings, and the design and evaluation of electronic health information systems for Red Cross Emergency Response Units.
Across all of these emergencies, in different roles, his conviction grew that many deaths were preventable with the right community-level action, the right knowledge in the right hands at the right moment.
You could say that conviction is what Panu spent twenty years working on.
It is also what TGLF exists to do.
He is a practitioner who builds knowledge infrastructure to support lasting change, using the best available evidence.
That is, again, what TGLF exists to do.
Panu’s own words… and ours
In accepting this invitation, Panu wrote: “TGLF occupies a distinctive and necessary space in the global health landscape, and I have had the privilege of witnessing at close range the rigour, ambition, and humanity that underpin everything the Foundation does. To be recognised by an organisation of this standing, one whose mission I believe in deeply, means a great deal to me. I look forward to contributing in whatever ways prove most useful: as an ambassador for the Foundation’s work, as a source of advice and insight when called upon, and as an active participant in the TGLF community of Fellows.”
The phrase “active participant” matters to us. The Fellowship, in our reading, is a working relationship between people who have arrived at the same questions by different roads.
TGLF President Professor Karen E. Watkins said: “Much of what we know about how adults actually learn at work has been hard-won outside the classroom, in the daily practice of people who face real problems and have to act on them. Panu Saaristo’s career is a long, careful study in that kind of learning. He has helped build systems that take the experience of nurses, volunteers, and field staff seriously as a source of knowledge, and that turn that experience into something the wider field can use. For our Foundation, his Fellowship is more than a recognition. It is a signal of what we believe a learning organisation in the humanitarian field should look like, namely one that learns with the people closest to the work. We are honoured to welcome Panu, and we look forward to thinking and doing together in the years ahead.”
TGLF Founder Reda Sadki said: “The leaders I want to learn from are the people who, when a crisis hits, do not ask who is in charge. They ask what the community needs, and they listen before they speak. Panu Saaristo is one of those people. He has spent his career standing next to nurses, volunteers, and community health workers, treating their lived experience as the starting point rather than as something to be corrected. That is what humanitarian leadership looks like to me. It is quiet, it is patient, and it puts the people closest to the crisis at the centre of the response. We are honoured that he has agreed to walk into our second decade with us.”
What drew us together
The people we invite to become Fellows are not chosen because they hold titles or have accumulated institutional seniority. They are chosen because, at some point in conversation, it becomes clear that they have arrived at the same questions we are working on, by a road we did not walk ourselves.
With Panu, the convergence was immediate and substantive. He had already spent twenty years asking how knowledge reaches the people who need it, in the moment they need it, with the resources they actually have.
The convictions he carries – that peer learning is not a consolation prize for those without access to formal training, that the nurse working at district level holds knowledge the wider system does not know it needs, that horizontal exchange between practitioners is not a workaround but a primary mechanism of change – echo the convictions TGLF has built its first decade on. He reached them through practice. We reached them through building infrastructure to support practice. The overlap is complete.
That is what drew us together. The Fellowship is not a recognition of past achievement alone, though the achievement is substantial. It is a working relationship between people who share a diagnosis of what is broken and a conviction about what to do about it.
What comes next
Panu will contribute to TGLF’s work in humanitarian health as an advisor, a thought partner, and an ambassador for TGLF’s new ways to learn and lead. He brings the accumulated judgment of someone who has stood at the edge between knowledge and action, in the worst circumstances, and asked how to make the distance shorter.
The questions he will help us sharpen are the operational ones that humanitarian leaders are wrestling with right now, as funding for some donors contracts and the operational environment in conflict-affected and climate-stressed regions becomes harder. They are not abstract. They are the questions a desk officer in Brussels, a country director in Kinshasa, or a coordinator in Maiduguri faces in the same week.
- How do you reach the last mile when international staff cannot go there, large consortia stall in security-compromised zones, and the people who can act are local nurses, community health workers, district officers, and volunteers who are already there?
- How does a major donor support thousands of local actors at once, without a bureaucratic apparatus large enough to contract and audit each of them individually, and without losing the speed that makes localisation worth doing?
- How do you generate trustworthy bottom-up signals on what is actually happening in a district, in a refugee site, in a conflict pocket, when the official data is incomplete, late, or distorted by performance incentives, and triangulation is the only honest option?
- How do you move from siloed vertical responses, namely health, nutrition, WASH, protection, mental health and psychosocial support, to area-based work that takes the whole community as the unit of response and gives the people in that area one entry point rather than ten?
- How do you keep coordination, protection standards, and humanitarian principles alive when in-person coordination mechanisms collapse or are no longer affordable, and the network has to hold itself together remotely, across organisations, languages, and time zones?
- How do you make preparedness real, not on paper, for the next cholera outbreak, the next measles wave, the next heatwave, the next displacement shock, by building on the people who will be there before, during, and after the response, and who keep working long after a project has closed?
These are not questions with settled answers. Nor is the above list exhaustive, by any means. But they are some of the burning questions that international agencies and ministries of health are working on. Panu has spent twenty years inside them, advocating for these questions to be answered with affected communities. That is why we want him in the room.
A note on TGLF’s Fellowship programme: building what matters, together
The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) began building its Fellowship programme since 2020. We have not spoken about it publicly until now. We wanted to invite people who share our commitment to education as a philosophy for change. We believe what matters when asking questions is not whether the evidence exists, but how the evidence reaches a community health worker in a flood zone, in the moment she has to act, with the resources she has at hand.
A number of leaders in health, humanitarian response, education, and policy have since accepted our invitation to become Fellows. Each joined because of shared conviction. We are grateful to each of them, and the relationships we have built together are among the most generative in our work.
This year we close our first decade and open our second. The Foundation that started in 2016 has grown into a network of 80,000 health and humanitarian workers in 137 countries, most of them at district and community level, who chose to learn differently, to lead locally, and to refuse the idea that change has to wait for the next expert to fly in. They built this. We did not. They did.
The second decade asks more of us, and of the people we work alongside. It is the right moment to make a Fellowship appointment public for the first time, and to begin to introduce the remarkable, eclectic group of leaders who have agreed to walk into this decade with us.
As we move into our second decade, we will introduce other Fellows, one at a time, when the moment and the context make it right. We thank each Fellow for their commitment, and we thank the 80,000 practitioners in the TGLF network whose work is the reason any of this matters.