Teach to Reach is the largest peer learning platform, network, and community by and for health and humanitarian workers — launched by The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) in January 2021 out of an immunization training programme during the COVID-19 pandemic, and now in its fifth year. As part of TGLF’s tenth anniversary, each month a Teach to Reach Launch Event convenes TGLF Scholars worldwide to share experience, introduce the new courses and programmes, and learn from each other. This is the first of four articles about the 14 May 2026 session.
Healthy ageing and life course immunization
Dr Elizabeth Oduwole has watched people die from a vaccine-preventable disease.
She is a retired Permanent Secretary of the Lagos State Civil Service, a consultant anesthetist, and now an advisor to the Nigerian Red Cross in the Gulf State branch.
On 14 May, she came to Teach to Reach with a question she has already taken to community, state, and national channels, without resolution.
“In Nigeria, the pneumococcal vaccine for the elderly is not part of our national policy,” she said. “I have a passion for it because I have seen people die from it. And if I want to shock you, I know we have lost two former heads of state in Nigeria to this very disease. And yet, in the developed countries, this very vaccine is on the policy of the elderly, because it has a 30 percent fatality. And of all people, the elderly should be the ones to be protected.”
The sentence about two former heads of state is the kind of detail policy briefs do not contain.
It exposes a familiar weakness in public health: systems designed around one stage of life often refuse to recognize another.
Dr Oduwole has done the formal work.
The system has not yet caught up to her question.
What about the well-being of health professionals in the workplace?
There was someone in the room who could not perform that kind of confidence in public.
He is a medical doctor and radiology resident in a country of Eastern Europe.
He did not take the microphone.
He wrote one question into the chat, and it deserves to be read in full.
“How can a healthcare professional find global networks of support and recover after facing severe systemic lockout and psychological distress as the consequence of having reported in a public manner unethical or even outright dangerous medical practices? Asking for myself, after having been dismissed without warning and stripped of the right to practice medicine in any other capacity due to having been an active whistleblower against systemic corruption.”
Exploring what matters when you work for health
Two questions in the same hour, from a senior physician in Lagos and a young doctor in Romania, mark the range of what a worker can lose by speaking inside a health system.
One has seen patients die because policy will not move.
The other has been stripped of the right to practice for refusing to stay quiet.
Both arrived at this Teach to Reach peer learning event because they had already exhausted the channels their training said to use.
Menopause and healthy ageing
A third worker carried a quieter problem.
Anette Ahokas works with older people in Ireland.
She has 25 years in healthcare business support and is a qualified behavioural health therapist.
Her question was about the menopause primer the event was helping to launch, but it pointed at something larger.
“Even just a simple thing, like signing up for [an online course], I had a couple of elderly people who could not even register on the website to be able to gain that information that they had read about and were really interested in.”
The detail is small enough to be missed.
It is also a complete description of a service failure.
Older people read a description of a course, want the information, and cannot get through the registration form.
A workforce strategy that builds courses faster than it builds access for the people they are supposedly for has a problem its own dashboard will not see.
What happens to One Health when the climate changes?
In the French session, Naomie Mayemba Kibakila gave the room a different kind of concern.
She is a doctor and a master’s candidate in One Health Epidemiology at the University of Kinshasa, working with the One Health Institute for Africa. She is convinced that “with climate change today, we are seeing a resurgence of infectious diseases, and floods are only the most visible part.”
Climate, infection, water, animals, and weakened services already meet in the places where many of the workers in the room practice.
One Health stops being a policy term when a worker uses it to describe what she sees arriving at her clinic before it appears in a strategy document.
Vaccines work: what happens when the community sees measles, but not polio?
Claude Kashasa Mubulanyi wrote from South Kivu about an April 2026 polio campaign.
The chat sentence is worth reading slowly.
“During the polio vaccination campaign conducted in April 2026 in several health zones of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, I observed marked reluctance among some parents, who insisted on receiving the measles vaccine first. Now more than ever, it is essential to step up advocacy by amplifying the voices of communities in order to restore trust and adapt our interventions to the realities on the ground.”
He did not describe the parents as ignorant.
He described them as making a triage choice the campaign had not accounted for, and he said the response had to start by carrying community voices high enough to change the intervention.
In an outbreak, that distinction is the difference between a campaign people avoid and an intervention people recognize as their own.
What is the significance and value of sharing experience?
These were not isolated comments.
They were questions from people who had reached the edges of their own authority.
A doctor cannot rewrite immunization policy alone.
A whistleblower physician cannot rebuild his career alone.
A specialist in elderly care cannot redesign a course registration system alone.
A One Health researcher cannot make floods less infectious alone.
A vaccination officer cannot rebuild community trust alone.
The most important intelligence about a programme often appears first as a worker’s unresolved question.
By the time it becomes a report, a policy brief, or a funding priority, someone has already been carrying it alone, sometimes for years.
The 14 May launch event did not solve any of these questions.
It did something workers had asked for before they walked in: it gave the questions witnesses.
That is the only argument this article needs to make.
The follow-up articles examine what the witnesses then do.