The Geneva Learning Foundation’s Reda Sadki taught his first course on the colonial legacies of science in 1991, then left science to spend twenty years as a community organizer. 25 years later, he created The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF), through which more than 80,000 health and humanitarian workers, most of them in West and Central Africa, now learn from and support each other. Asked by Global Health Otherwise to speak about careers in global health, he chose to describe epistemological transformation in practice: what happened when 1,300 people who work for health explored why they do this work and what they would change, turning their collective intelligence into the Manifesto for global health. The hardest part was not listening and thinking – it was figuring out how to turn what the community learned into action.
Dr Luchuo Engelbert Bain moderated the Global Health Otherwise webinar, titled “Enter, stay or leave? The future of careers in global health” with Dr Oluwaseun Adewunmi. The other speakers were Professor Trudie Lang (University of Oxford and The Global Health Network), Muhammad Isa Jaafar (Federation of African Medical Students’ Associations), Dr Gayathri Delanerolle (Digital Evidence-Based Medicine Lab), Dr Jean Claude Katte (University of Exeter Medical School) and Dr Samuel Ojong (UNICEF Mozambique and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health).
Moderator: The next person I would like to invite is Reda Sadki. Reda Sadki is an education innovator and organizational leader dedicated to transforming learning and professional development in global health. He will be talking primarily about frontline workers, their recognition and career progression. Reda Sadki, over to you, please. Thank you.
Reda Sadki: All right. Thank you, Luchuo and Global Health Otherwise colleagues. So, good evening, good afternoon.
So, I was born in Geneva in 1970. I am Swiss and Algerian, and proud to be both Arab and African. Ten years ago, I founded The Geneva Learning Foundation with a group of ten educators, humanitarians and, yes, some global health folks as well.
I originally studied biochemistry. And in 1991, I taught my very first course, about the colonial legacies of science. In fact, I was so disappointed by my fellow science students’ lack of interest in society that I left, to spend the next 20 years of my life as a community organizer, living and working side by side with Arab and African families facing the triptych of HIV, poverty and racism. Biomedical research is what led to the antiretrovirals that prevent death. But dignity in life required families to learn from and support each other.
And so, 25 years later, I created The Geneva Learning Foundation, TGLF, to invent new ways to tackle rising critical threats to our societies.
So, about TGLF. We are celebrating our 10th anniversary this year. The 80,000-plus health and humanitarian staff that I work with every day, first of all, they are not in Geneva. 70% are in West and Central Africa. About half are Francophone. They are not our staff or employees. Most work for ministries of health, in districts and health facilities, and they do not owe what they learn to TGLF. They learn from and support each other.
One of the questions for this panel was: where do these workers fit in the future of global health? And I think the way we ask the question matters. I would ask: where does global health fit in the future of people who work for the health of their communities? It is really a different kind of question.
And rather than polemics, I am going to try to illustrate that with something that we actually did. In 2022, 6,185 people who work for health, from 99 different countries, joined what we call the Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030. And we asked simple things, like: why do you work for health? What would you change about the field that you work in?
We received thousands of answers, grouped them by theme, analyzed them, and shared the draft back with the people who wrote it. That became an open-source manifesto for global health. Let us see if I can share the original. Actually, version two is here. Yes, here.
So that was in June 2023, and then version two came in October. About 1,300 health workers, all job categories, many different countries, in English and French, contributed. On 15 September 2023, for the final engagement to finalize version two, 390 health leaders met online to review it, from community health workers to senior national planners. Most work, again, for their ministry of health.
And what was peculiar, according to some folks who heard about this meeting, was that no international consultants were in that room. There were no global agencies, no donors. In global health, obviously, authority usually runs the other way.
The engagement continued. Through Teach to Reach, health workers kept sharing what they do when the guideline runs out, when the guideline does not have the answer to the question you need. And it keeps growing. In December 2024, 24,610 people participated in the 11th edition of Teach to Reach to meet, network and learn. Teach to Reach was the platform where these people who work for health connected to elaborate what became the manifesto.
And then, the funny thing is, we got stuck. We were not sure what to do with the manifesto. It is a beautiful document. It is a living document. It is a base grounded in the lived experience of health workers. And then what? It actually took us another three years to figure out the “then what”.
In February 2026, we published what we are calling the Leadership Framework. Again, it was built from the experience of those who work for health. One sentence a contributor might have typed into one of the questionnaires, or something that somebody said, might have helped identify a specific competency.
So we did not invent this manifesto. Our role was really to facilitate and, ultimately, to hand it back to the people who created it.
So this is an example of a different kind of knowledge practice, a different kind of epistemology: how we know what we know, who the knowers are, who owns the knowledge. Where, for some, community engagement might be one step in the research cycle, we thought: well, could we imagine together what it means for communities to design research, to own it, to commission it, to evaluate it? We see this Leadership Framework as a kind of prototype for what that actually looks like.
In the same way, can we imagine ways to ingrain giving back, so that research has to return data as knowledge you can use, every time? And could that turn out to be more important, or at least as important, as where data is stored exactly and who the safekeeper for that data is?
So what is in the framework? I realize this is a complex grid. Do not worry, I am not going to try to go through it. But it is nine rows and three columns.
The nine rows are what local leaders do. They reason through problems when the guideline fails. They build community trust. They use data, and now AI, on their own terms. They find resources locally. That capacity to do with what you have is actually one of the few things likely to enable health work at the local level to survive, with 70% of global health funding having disappeared almost two years ago. They respond to climate threats. They negotiate safe access in conflict. They look after their teams. They learn from their peers. They deliver care with equity at the center.
And again, yes, contributors chose to take part. So it shows the range of leadership competencies, not how common each competency is. That is also important. But it does not diminish, it actually increases, the value of an organically grown framework developed by and for people who work for health, who are where the action is.
The three columns show how each of those grows. The practitioner keeps the service running. The collaborator adapts to a local situation and shares what works. And then the strategist mentors others, mobilizes resources and, ultimately, contributes to changing the system. That first level, the practitioner, is not something lesser. It is competent work done every day.
And this framework has three uses. A health worker can see their growth and chart their career journey. A ministry can write job descriptions that recognize the capabilities that, in some cases, make the difference between life and death, but may not be written down or recognized anywhere. And a funder can ask what capacity it is paying for, what it is investing in.
So we are now sharing this framework with the TGLF community and with partners.
And so, to the question “enter, stay or leave”, I would say: enter if you want to solve real problems with committed peers. Stay if your work is recognized and shared. And before you leave, ask who recognizes your work, and whether that can change.
Thank you.
Moderator: Thank you so much. That was a very interesting way to look at things, especially from a community-centered research and design perspective. I actually share a very similar view to what you just talked about: as a researcher, I see myself as an observer, while my participants are actually the professionals. So thank you for that.