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 second of four articles about the 14 May 2026 session.
The most consequential moment in a peer learning event often happens before the room opens.
TGLF’s facilitators spend the preshow listening to early participants, helping them shape a question, deciding who will be invited to speak first, and watching for the contributions that would otherwise be drowned out.
The slide deck on 14 May 2026 made the rationale plain. “Everyone is invited to share experience. When you listen, you reflect on your own situation. If you want to go further, you enroll in the course.”
Said quickly, this sounds like inclusion language.
Practiced, it is a structural choice.
Health systems are full of first microphones.
They belong to people with titles, slide decks, recognizable success stories, and the cultural permission to perform confidence.
Peer learning works only when there is a second microphone, and when someone in the room is responsible for it.
On 14 May, the second microphone surfaced a doctor in eastern Congo whose contribution would never appear in a programme report.
NCDs in humanitarian settings has everything to do with family
Kevin Kalonda Symphorien is a young physician from South Kivu, currently in Uganda.
He described an 84-year-old woman who lived alone in his neighbourhood.
“She had high blood pressure and had been going through menopause for a long time. She lived alone. Her children live far away. So, since she was living alone and still needed some support, I, as her medical doctor, had to ask my little brothers who are here—they’re 7 and 8 years old—to go to her place just to spend 20 or 30 minutes a day with her. And that really helped give this mama a little boost. And one day she even told me, ‘Doctor, the children you bring me do me good, and they really do make up for my own children who are too far away.’”
There is no protocol in the published literature for prescribing two small siblings as social care.
There is no funding line for it.
A first microphone would have called this anecdotal.
The second microphone heard a worker describing a workable response to isolation in a setting where the formal one does not exist.
Mental health in humanitarian settings
Hugues Pataoli, a humanitarian worker in Goma, used the same channel to surface something colleagues across the sector rarely admit.
“In the humanitarian sector—the field in which we work—these conditions are often overlooked, particularly psychiatric and psychological disorders. Yet these conditions, like menopause, require support, because women going through menopause face difficult challenges.”
A funding portfolio that has separated mental health into its own vertical does not see what Hugues sees.
He works with displaced women and treats psychiatric illness and menopause as a continuum of unaccompanied suffering.
That observation is also a diagnosis of how the humanitarian sector currently divides bodies.
These are the kinds of contributions that surface because the community has already done the work of asking who has a problem they have not solved, and then making sure that worker has a path into the room when the livestream starts.
Preventing and mitigating gender-based violence (GBV) in Nigeria
Theresa Jatau works on community-led monitoring with the Civil Society for the Eradication of Tobacco Losses, across 36 plus one Nigerian states.
Her contribution was a working recommendation, not a complaint.
“I work with women and girls, and so in trying to get access to health facilities, we discovered that there is a lot of GBV that goes on for women and girls when trying to access health services. So that is something I want to recommend, to expand a way of community-led monitoring within the health system, so that women and girls can be safer when accessing services.”
Access is usually counted in doors opened.
Theresa’s question asks what happens once a woman crosses the door.
A clinic that cannot protect women and girls from sexual or physical harm during the consultation is not accessible in the only sense that matters, and she has a method, community-led monitoring, that has already worked in other domains.
Tina Iroghama Agbonyinma added the missing context in eleven words: “Silencing the victim and retaliation is a great challenge in gender based violence.”
Two Nigerian women in the same chat then describe a system in which access is measured wrong and retaliation against women who report violence is the unfunded constraint.
The intelligence value of those two short messages, read together, is high.
A second microphone is also what allows a contributor to speak through a health worker they trust.
When a worker cannot unmute, the host reads the message on air.
When a worker has registered but cannot attend, a colleague in the chat speaks to the question they would have asked.
The slide deck described the invitation simply.
The implementation is harder than that, and it depends on the facilitators being willing to spend their attention on the people who will not push to be heard.
What does this mean for how scale gets counted?
Most monitoring frameworks measure reach: the number of workers a programme has touched after the design is finished.
A peer learning event suggests a different metric: the number of workers whose experience can be heard before the design is finished.
That is not a softer version of impact measurement.
It is a harder one.
It asks whether the people who will live with a programme can shape it in advance, rather than receiving it later through a cascade.
The 14 May 2026 Teach to Reach session held 46 countries in one room in English and 21 in French.
A room that diverse cannot learn through a single voice from the front.
It needs the chat as a parallel channel, the preshow as a preparatory channel, and someone responsible for making sure the workers who arrive with the hardest problems do not lose the floor to the workers who arrive with the cleanest stories.
Without that, peer learning becomes a panel.
Workers used every opening available to make field knowledge visible on 14 May.
One spoke into the microphone.
One wrote from the chat.
One arrived early and rehearsed a question with a facilitator.
One described a quiet intervention with two small children in a neighbour’s living room.
The second microphone matters because many health systems still have no first microphone for these workers at all.