The following is based on a presentation delivered by Reda Sadki, Executive Director of The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) on 17 March 2025 at the headquarters of RBM Partnership to End Malaria in Geneva, Switzerland. The transcript has been edited for clarity. TGLF and RBM formed a partnership in November 2024.
This is a brief partnership impact report exploring what has come out so far of the first few months of collaboration between the Geneva Learning Foundation, my organization, and the RBM Partnership to E.
A little bit of background about the current malaria landscape.
We know that global progress has stalled, with climate impacts, resistance to drugs and insecticides, resource constraints, and many cross border challenges.
There is definitely a need for new approaches to revitalize progress.
Activating a global peer learning for malaria network
Our first collaboration with RBM took place around Teach to Reach.
This is a global peer learning platform for health workers, connecting over 60,000 health professionals focused on workers at the district and facility level.
Leaders from 4,000 locally-led organizations participate.
They have formed the REACH Network.
REACH Network in action: Ahead of Teach to Reach 11, health leaders from 45 countries share malaria experiences in REACH network session
It is not only a subnational network.
There are over 1,000 national ministry of health planners who participate.
This is about a continuous learning process.
What do we measure and how?
What we measure and how with Teach to Reach goes along three measurement streams.
The first is reach, and that is just a number of participants, how many people access content, and how many people actively participate.
Scale and reach do matter, but this is the least important measurement stream.
The second is value.
We measure five different dimensions using the evidence-based value creation framework.
There we can actually quantify and collect qualitative data about what difference is being made and what value is being created for participants.
The third one, which we are most interested in, is the individual health outcomes, project implementation, and change at the organizational level.
Let us be very clear.
Teach to Reach is part of a broader peer learning to action system that gets us to change in health outcomes.
Teach to Reach itself stops mostly at value.
(This is only the first event focused on malaria. It is the stepping to implement TGLF’s model, which leads to thousands of health workers collaborating to implement local action in the Impact Accelerator.)
Based on past experience, with continued tracking and measurement, we will be able to document evidence of improved health outcomes and link them back to Teach to Reach.
Nevertheless, I will focus solely on value creation in this presentation.
First of all, in this collaboration, we definitely achieved our operational and value goals.
We reached 24,610 health workers over 70 countries at Teach to Reach 11.
(The recorded event remains open, so that the community continues to grow.)
Then we had a malaria special event, and there we had 1,715 health workers split between francophones and anglophones, with a little bit more, 1,096 anglophones than the 619 francophones.
That was from 46 countries.
This did not come out of thin air.
This is made possible by the amazing Teach to Reach community platform and network.
If we were able to mobilize health workers around malaria, it is because we have seen continuous growth since January 2021 in the Teach to Reach community.
70% of Teach to Reach participants live and work in West and Central Africa countries, which are high malaria burden countries.
Most participants work in health facilities and districts, working for government, civil society organizations, and francophone networks.
The largest communities are from Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
One in five face armed conflict.
The power of experiential learning and local knowledge
At Teach to Reach, health workers share experience and learn from each other.
There is no expert presentation.
It is about explaining what happened to you, things you actually did, and then learning from that.
What outputs do we get from all of this sharing?
The first way we quantify the outputs of experiential learning is just how many experiences were shared.
There were 424 experiences shared.
Download the Experiences shared in English and French.
Sharing an experience is not just sharing an anecdote or telling a story.
It is providing a detailed, context specific narrative describing a situation, what happened, who was involved, and how it turned out.
Global health specialists tend to doubt the validity of personal experience, which we qualify as anecdotes, the lowest form of evidence.
Yet, we know that quantitative surveillance sometimes lags behind rapidly shifting local realities.
Health workers are stationed at the very frontlines of environmental and behavioral shifts.
When weather patterns change or temperatures rise, these professionals are often the first to observe the shifting behaviors of diseases like malaria.
The narratives they share, organized into a network, form a vital early warning system.
They also remind us of the devastating personal toll of this disease.
They know because they are there every day and no one else is.
Health workers face malaria.
It affects you.
It affects those you love.
Rosemary Adejo Adage from Nigeria shared that malaria has negatively impacted her family, and she lost a pregnancy at seven weeks due to the disease.
Pamela Njeru from Kenya explained that she had malaria that almost ended her life. Her child had malaria that almost killed him.
Rachel Aniniwaa Addo from Ghana described being weak and vomiting profusely.
She had to wake up in the middle of the night to wet her child with a towel and water due to high temperatures.
Recognizing, listening to, understanding, and honoring the experiences of health workers improves science.
How peer learning for malaria mobilizes collective intelligence to lead change
In terms of outputs, we have the event itself.
That was live, this session of peer and experience sharing followed by a special event dedicated to this idea that health workers united can end malaria.
Ahead of the event we had already issued a short collection of health worker perspectives on malaria.
Afterward, we issued the Experiences Shared, the collection of all of the experiences shared in writing during Teach to Reach.
At TGLF, we have an Insights Unit, a team of remarkable humans that packages this collective intelligence into practical knowledge that can inform practice.
Our first mission is to give back to the community.
You shared an experience, and here are everyone’s experiences in a synthetic summary form so you can actually make sense of large volumes of qualitative experiential data.
This is continuous learning, where every event (like the fast-paced Insights Live) and output (like the full Insights Report) is given back to the community and shared with partners.
We then ask: what did you learn? What have you done differently as a result?
This notion of collective intelligence is that health workers can provide these granular data points through qualitative narrative descriptions, and they can also provide rapid feedback
Our research has shown that sharing experience improves performance.
We have high quality data in this situational collective intelligence from this network of health workers.
What we can do with this network is rapidly collect field observations on the questions we are interested in or the questions that the network is interested in.
However, we realized that these insights can also inform policy, if global partners are willing to listen and learn.
We have a number of media partnerships that continuously broaden the reach of these outputs.
For malaria, we describe what questions we asked and how many contributions we received in return.
From this came four major themes.
These are data quality and use, clinical case management, community engagement and vector control, and surveillance and seasonal response.
These were recurring running threads throughout the experiences that were shared.
That alone provides insight that we can begin to mine and extract meaning from.
For example, Caroline Akoshile from Nigeria highlighted a critical behavioral challenge with vector control.
She noted that distributing bed nets requires accompanying behavior change activities, because people sometimes use the nets to fish instead of sleeping under them.
Malamine Sane from Senegal confirmed this exact phenomenon, observing isolated cases in riverside communities using the nets as fishing nets.
He demonstrated that the key to success lay in awareness raising and distribution by peers, showing that community commitment is the core of the success of the fight against malaria.
As we look toward the introduction of malaria vaccines, health workers are preparing the ground.
Abdou Dan Bascore from Niger advised that good communication will be necessary to anticipate false information, suggesting the use of existing systems of relays and leaders.
Prince Arthur Ssajjabi from Uganda emphasized that his community would be very happy to receive these vaccines, stating he would be the first to use them because malaria disturbs them every month.
The experiences shared do not stop here.
We call this the Knowledge to Action Hub.
Insights get turned into audio podcasts, insights reports, and newsletters for rapid sharing and feedback.
That is a really powerful distribution mechanism.
Measuring the value of peer learning to action
How do we measure impact?
This is the key question.
We have within the learning to action model of the Geneva Learning Foundation three interlocking pieces.
The first is network value creation, asking what participants gain from their participation in networked learning activities.
We measure that using our value creation framework.
Second is learning culture, a measure of the work environment’s capacity for change.
(If you have a great idea, how likely is it that it will be taken up, adapted, and scaled?)
Third, we get to health outcomes, verifying health outcome improvements that we can attribute to the interventions.
With Teach to Reach, we are looking primarily at capacity for change and network value creation.
We do not claim to get to health outcomes with Teach to Reach alone because it is part of the larger TGLF system that does do that.
What does a value creation measurement actually look like?
It combines qualitative feedback with a quantitative Likert measuring five dimensions.
We ask about professional change, social connections, professional practice, professional influence, and change in worldview.
You might wonder what a high score in professional practice and influence actually means for someone focused on clinical outcomes.
The success of many health interventions depends on local adaptation.
Conventional training imparts technical knowledge.
Our framework measures whether participants have acquired the agency to adapt those global guidelines to their specific local context.
When a health worker reports a high score in professional practice and influence, they provide evidence of a critical behavioral shift.
A strong change in worldview demonstrates that they see themselves as active problem solvers who can correct local anomalies.
They gain the capacity to overcome local implementation bottlenecks.
We may not be able to tell you in the abstract what a 5.06 (on a 1-6 scale) means, but we do have a global value creation baseline from 2022 with more than 10,000 health workers responding.
We can show the difference from the global baseline.
That global baseline is based on an intensive, very successful peer learning exercise called the full learning cycle over four months.
It is impressive to see that this single event was significantly higher than our global baseline.
We saw a 24% stronger professional change impact.
We had a slightly lower social connection score, but that is understandable for a one time event.
This collaboration enhanced professional capabilities compared to the global baseline, resulting in 49 percent higher professional influence, 41 percent greater impact on professional practice, and 45 percent stronger worldview change.
This single event actually had a very powerful effect, when it is compared to a comprehensive four-month peer learning program.
Outcomes and the continuum of action
What can we conclude across these five dimensions?
We see a successful building of technical capacity.
The event enabled knowledge sharing and collaboration.
Analysis of these health worker narratives surfaced more than learning.
There was immediate impact on malaria prevention efforts, improved advocacy and leadership, and transformed understanding.
That is quite impressive to see these numbers, compare them to the baseline, and analyze what they imply in terms of what people gain from this event.
We have three key takeaways.
- There was consistent positive impact across all professional dimensions.
- Community health workers reported the highest influence and worldview impact.
- Education and research participants showed the strongest practice improvements.
There are also important gender insights.
Female participants reported slightly higher scores across all dimensions, especially when it comes to professional practice.
The social connection dimension showed the largest gender gap.
Women actually reported notably higher scores in that dimension.
Pulling out insights based on job categories, community health workers showed the highest scores in professional influence and worldview change.
Nurses reported the highest professional change score, which is consistent with women reporting higher professional change scores than men.
Public health workers showed very consistent scores across all dimensions.
How confident are we in these findings?
You might ask how we know these things and how we can be confident about our findings.
Epidemiologists rely on robust data and strong comparative frameworks to evaluate any public health intervention.
Our value creation measurement is a standardized psychometric instrument designed specifically to quantify professional value creation.
When we report these specific improvements, they are based on data measured on a rigorous scale across five distinct dimensions.
We can be confident in these findings because we compare this specific malaria cohort of over 1,700 health workers against a massive global baseline of more than 10,000 health workers.
This baseline was established during a comprehensive four month learning program.
Just as you would use a historical baseline to measure the efficacy of a new vector control tool, we use this global baseline to evaluate the specific impact of the malaria event.
Because our sample size is so large, the consistent positive impact represents a statistically significant and clear signal.
We can confidently say that this collaboration with the RBM Partnership to End Malaria enhanced the professional capabilities of the participants with particularly strong impact on their influence within the malaria elimination community.
What these metrics actually us about peer learning for malaria
To understand these figures, we first look at the comparative baseline.
When we state that these metrics are higher or stronger, we are comparing the results of a single, short malaria event involving over 1,700 health workers against a global baseline.
That baseline consists of data from over 10,000 health workers who completed an intensive, four month peer learning program.
The fact that a single event generated scores 41 to 49 percent higher than a comprehensive four month program signals an unusually high level of immediate relevance and activation for the participants.
Here is exactly what those specific dimensions indicate for malaria implementation on the ground.
- A 49 percent higher professional influence score indicates that participants feel significantly more equipped to guide their peers and advocate for change within their local health systems. They return to their facilities ready to convince colleagues to adopt new practices, such as pairing bed net distribution with behavior change communication.
- A 41 percent greater impact on professional practice means that health workers are actively changing their daily routines. They are directly applying the local solutions they learned from peers to improve clinical case management or vector control in their specific districts.
- A 45 percent stronger worldview change demonstrates a fundamental cognitive shift. Participants transition from seeing themselves as passive recipients of global health directives to viewing themselves as active problem solvers who possess the agency to overcome local implementation bottlenecks.
For an epidemiologist or program manager, these metrics provide quantitative evidence that the intervention successfully built the local capacity required to adapt global malaria strategies to complex local realities.
This single Teach to Reach event provides indications that this could lead to very powerful impact and change.
Teach to Reach is part of a continuum of activities and interventions that takes individuals and organizations from knowledge acquisition all the way to the point where they are credibly reporting impact on improved health outcomes.
What is the underlying theory of change for peer learning for malaria?
Our theory of change is about demonstrating improved health by capturing integrated insights, supporting actual implementation, and capturing systemic change.
This comes from combining value creation, influencing capacity for locally led change, and collecting local health indicators.
That is how we link outcomes in health to value creation and generate qualitative insights.
We showed in January 2020 that we had a cohort six months in, where alumni implemented action plans they developed together with peer learning being used to support implementation.
We compared the implementation progress after six months between those who joined this final stage and a control group that had also developed action plans but did not join the peer learning cohort.
The group using our approach made significant implementation progress, and we had begun to see the implementation and results documented.
By contrast, after eliminating confounders, the control group did not make any significant progress.
Thank you very much for listening, and we hope that this presentation will be useful to making sense of the Geneva Learning Foundation’s peer learning to action model.
We are aware that it is quite different and challenges a number of underlying assumptions that you and others may have.
We hope that this will help clarify and explain what it is we are talking about, why it matters, what difference it makes, and exactly how it works.
References
References
Reda Sadki (2019). Rethinking the “Webinar”: Sage on Screen, Guide on Side, or Both?. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/j0qmx-stg25
Reda Sadki (2020). Ideas Engine: What is The Geneva Learning Foundation’s insights mechanism? Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://redasadki.me/2020/09/17/ideas-engine-what-is-the-geneva-learning-foundations-insights-mechanism/
Reda Sadki (2023). Learning-based complex work: how to reframe learning and development. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/7fe95-1fz14
Reda Sadki (2023). The COVID-19 Peer Hub as an example of Collective Intelligence (CI) in practice. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/zp1na-fxa29
Reda Sadki (2024). Ahead of Teach to Reach 11, health leaders from 45 countries share malaria experiences in REACH network session. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/vhky9-fvf32
Reda Sadki (2024). Anecdote or lived experience: reimagining knowledge for climate-resilient health systems. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/hgkcb-52q38
Reda Sadki (2024). How can we reliably spread evidence-based practices at the speed and scale modern health challenges demand?. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/cqxmj-3bd96
Reda Sadki (2024). Learning culture: the missing link in global health between learning and performance. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/wkrvk-nfk82
Reda Sadki (2024). What is the pedagogy of Teach to Reach?. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/zswhw-65q70
Reda Sadki (2024). Why answer Teach to Reach Questions?. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/g90jr-e8485
Reda Sadki (2024). Why lack of continuous learning is the Achilles heel of immunization . Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/93ad8-nds22
Reda Sadki (2025). What is The Geneva Learning Foundation’s Impact Accelerator?. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/redasadki.21161
The Geneva Learning Foundation. (2024). Teach to Reach 11. Expériences partagées 3. Les professionnels de la santé se penchent sur l’éradication du paludisme (1.0). Les professionnels de la santé s’unissent pour lutter contre le paludisme. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14220339
The Geneva Learning Foundation. (2024). Teach to Reach 11. Experiences shared. 3. Health worker insights to end malaria (1.0). Teach to Reach 11: Health workers united to end malaria. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14218141