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Dear Reader,
You see that climate change is hurting the health of your community.
On Thursday 2 July 2026, you are invited to meet health workers who are already taking action.
Bring one challenge it causes in your work.
You may leave with an answer a peer has already tested.
What do health workers do when the road to the clinic floods, when the clinic is hotter than ever, when more people fall sick, more often, than before?
This session is about those local solutions, the ones health workers are already using to save lives.
The people who shared them, from more than 60 countries, will be our guests of honour.
Participants will get access to our new report on local action to mitigate the impact of the climate crisis on health and the 14 surprising recommendations for community staff, planners, and global partners.
🗣️ This newsletter is interactive. Share your experience wherever you see this icon.
Best regards,
Reda Sadki and Charlotte Mbuh
The Geneva Learning Foundation
P.-S. Tell us what you think of this newsletter. It takes two minutes, and it shapes the next issue.
The Geneva Learning Foundation Scholar Newsletter, issue 5 (2 July 2026)
📋 Climate change is harming your community’s health: a practical guide to what you can do
➡️ Read the practical guide to see what you can do as a health professional
You see the rains arriving early, the clinic running hotter, more people falling sick more often. This guide shows you what you can do about it, where you are, with what you have. You can start this week.
📖 Why your work during the last flood matters: three years of climate-health action
When the storm flooded the roads in Bomaka, Cameroon, a midwife named Geh Raphaela Agwa saved twins during a cord presentation, then wrote down what she did. Her neighbours had already dug the gutters so cars could pass. Neither of them waited for a policy to tell them how.
This new review reads three years of work that treats accounts like hers as evidence, not anecdote. It gathers what health workers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America see and do, at a scale no survey had reached, and gives it back to them as a basis for action. It is the clearest answer yet to a question that decides whether your knowledge is heard: why is what you witness every day called anecdotal, when you are the one who was there?
➡️ Read why frontline experience is the missing layer of the climate and health response
📋 Climate change and health: the event shows you what is possible, this new course helps you do it
The 2 July session lasts one hour. This new course is where you take your own challenge further, on your own time, with peers carrying the same one.
You may be the nurse who saw the rains come early, the community health worker walking further for safe water, or the officer rebuilding a clinic the wind tore down. The situations differ. The question is the same. What can you do, where you are, with what you have?
🗣️ Tell us one thing you are doing about climate change and health. Your answer could be the one a colleague is searching for.
It is the first peer learning course on the health impacts of climate change, built on the report and with the REACH network of more than 4,000 local organisations. You work through what peers did in emergencies, what they did to prepare, and how they brought the community in. You leave with practical steps for your own place.
📖 Use artificial intelligence to talk to 1,000 health workers fighting climate change impacts on health
➡️ Ask our artificial intelligence interface a question in plain language, like “what did health workers in my country say about floods?”, and you get a complete, reliable answer.
The report is called Teach to Reach 11: Local action to mitigate the impact of the climate crisis on health. Health workers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America wrote it. They answered three plain questions: how did climate change hurt the health of your community, what did you do, and how did you know it worked.
Three findings run across every country. Climate change is making familiar diseases worse, not inventing new ones, so the signal is in the malaria, cholera, and malnutrition you already track. Communities are organising their own responses, in 17 documented ways. And the people closest to the harm are the least visible in the global research and policy conversation.
Take Yopougon, in Côte d’Ivoire. Konan Kouamé Georges and his team did not wait for a guideline to change. When dengue followed the rains in 2023, they switched from weekly reporting to daily. That is a small change to read. It is a large change to do, and the kind formal systems take years to recommend.
You can put that collective intelligence to work now.
🌍 Psychological First Aid: the Netherlands’ national hub for mental health and psychosocial support
LOOP, the Netherlands’ national hub for mental health and psychosocial support, has joined the European network for Psychological First Aid (PFA), built by over 2,000 practitioners with support from The Geneva Learning Foundation. Now the people who support displaced children across the Netherlands can learn from colleagues in Ukraine and elsewhere. “The professionals supporting children affected by humanitarian crises and armed conflict should never have to be alone,” said Charlotte Mbuh, TGLF’s Director of Programmes.
The need is wide and the help is thin. About 45% of displaced people from Ukraine in the Netherlands report feeling mentally unhealthy. Only about 7% have seen a psychologist. One social worker can carry more than one hundred residents.
➡️ Read how the partnership came together.
📋 Bundibugyo: your colleagues in the response need you now
The first peer learning certification on Bundibugyo virus disease is open because the people fighting the outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda need each other inside it. If you have worked an Ebola response, write down the one thing you wish you had known, where a responder can read it this week.
In this outbreak, more than half of the people falling sick are women and girls. A rapid gender analysis explains what that changes for the response, and why it cannot wait.
Did you miss it? Read how Congolese caregivers are learning from each other as they build their response.
🗣️ Coming soon: In Togo, a decade of peer learning grew careers
Palenfo Gnourfateon, a long-time TGLF leader, was in Lomé for a measles survey when he gathered whatever Scholars he could reach. Reda Sadki joined to say a quick hello. He stayed the full 119 minutes, because the room had become a record of what a decade of peer learning builds.
Winiga Koudema is a paediatric clinician in Togo. He became a district then a hospital director with no training in epidemiology. During COVID-19 a colleague sent him a link to a TGLF course. The courses led him to a postgraduate diploma, then to consultancy, then to permanent staff at the World Health Organization. “This is an opportunity for me to truly re-launch myself,” he said.
Manzama-Esso Kola is a sociologist who came to vaccination through HIV work. A 2019 course on data triangulation changed his practice. He wrote a manual, trained the monitoring officers across 39 organisations, and now coordinates a platform the immunisation division consults. “We are a well-recognised and well-consulted actor in vaccination,” he said.
These are not careers that drifted away from the field. They moved deeper into it. That is the wager of the Scholar network: that the learning lives inside the people who run the system, and that it lasts. As Palenfo put it when the session closed, “once a scholar, always a scholar.”
➡️ Check Reda Sadki’s blog to find the full article.
📋 What health workers already know about menopause
The first global peer learning course on menopause for health workers opened on 22 June, built with Menoglobal. Its first days showed how much health workers already carry.
Asked what menopause brings to mind, a community health board member in Costa Rica reached for a phrase from traditional medicine, “the second Spring”, and wrote, “It gives me hope and peace, since I am going through this transition.” A medical social worker in Africa answered in one word: “silence.” The knowledge was there. It was waiting for a language.
➡️ You will be surprised by what they shared in week one.
🗣️ Share a menopause lesson, success, or challenge. Your words can help a colleague who has none yet.
✍️ Reading worth your time
A few recent reads from The Geneva Learning Foundation’s Reda Sadki and Charlotte Mbuh, if you have ten minutes between meetings.
The 79th World Health Assembly opened a formal process to reform how global health is governed. In a health post in northern Nigeria, Mariam is waiting, and the piece asks who is missing from the room.
In one Teach to Reach hour on 4 June 2026, a suspected Ebola patient walked into a clinic in Uganda and the staff backed away, with no training and no protective equipment. That moment opens the story of what health workers do when fear is in the room.
Handed a microphone to be celebrated, a Nigerian lecturer used her moment to confess a problem she cannot solve: her students asked her to stop because the heat made it impossible to think. Honouring Scholars meant hearing that too.
Faiza Rabbani was in a village dispensary in Punjab when a young woman walked past her in labour, with no equipment and no words for what was happening. It is the kind of case the newborn care course was built from.
Pick one.
🔜 What is coming next: a new leadership framework names the work you were never trained for, presented on 2 July
You have resolved a community’s refusal to vaccinate. You have kept a service running when the budget failed. You have negotiated safe passage in a conflict zone. No one taught you any of it, and it appears on no job description. On 2 July, that changes.
Over 1,300 health workers contributed to TGLF’s new competency framework for local health leadership, grounded in a decade of education for change. It calls itself a missing curriculum, because it names the adaptive work that formal training leaves out. It maps that work across nine domains, each described at three levels of proficiency.
For you, the promise is recognition. The invisible work you already do can finally appear in a performance review, on a CV, and in a path to advancement.
If you lead a team, it gives you a language for the people who solve the problems no protocol covers. It finds leadership at every level, not only in supervisors. And because each competency is a graded, observable behaviour, you can see who is ready to do more, and help them get there.