On the evening of March 30, 2026, Dr. Saeda Nahid Sultana logged into a global network from Bangladesh as rain and thunderstorms battered her city.
It was 7:35 p.m. local time.
Her internet connection was unstable.
She stayed anyway.
Halfway around the world, in the northern highlands of Ethiopia, Tamrat Boro had joined the same session from a humanitarian field site.
In Kinshasa, Dr. Noelly Zola Watusadisi was preparing to brief colleagues at the Gombe Health Zone the following morning on a personal initiative she calls “Panza Sango,” which means “transmit the message”.
And in Kaduna State, Nigeria, Umar Abubakar was thinking about floods, malaria, and a lesson he had learned from a peer across the continent: before you give instructions, listen.
None of them were being paid to be there.
They showed up because they wanted to.
They are all candidates to become Ambassadors of The Geneva Learning Foundation, a Swiss nonprofit that, over the past decade, has quietly built one of the largest peer learning networks for health and humanitarian workers in the world, reaching more than 80,000 participants across more than 100 countries.
The Foundation sends no trainers to the field.
It connects practitioners so they can learn from and support one another.
The simple act of connection, when it is done right, builds competence, confidence, and local action.
What these workers are doing, week by week, assignment by assignment, is something that defies the usual grammar of international development.
They are not writing grant proposals.
They are not attending conferences in capital cities.
They are writing their own stories, reviewing each other’s work, recruiting colleagues one conversation at a time, and making public commitments to lead.
They are building a movement from the ground up, powered by nothing more than trust, unstable connectivity, and the stubborn conviction that their experience matters.
A Monday call that is everything: community, calling, and coordination in a global network
The Monday assembly was a working meeting, the second week of a four-week Ambassador activation program.
Charlotte Mbuh, the Foundation’s Global Director and herself an alumna, ran the call with the brisk warmth of someone who has done this many times before.
The agenda seemed procedural: finish your peer reviews by Friday, complete the Week 2 questions, post your LinkedIn profile in the discussion forum.
But the human texture of the call kept breaking through the instructions.
Dr. Bala, a TGLF Scholar from India for eight years, described what the process was teaching him.
“Looking at the peer reviewing of others’ stories, we could easily understand what are the things they have done very good and what are the things I have not done yet,” he said. “It is making me learn more from my peers”.
Imran Ravji, a public health professional from Pakistan with three decades of field experience spanning Southeast Asia, Africa, and the United States, spoke with the energy of someone who had been waiting for exactly this opportunity.
“When I was doing the previous two courses of the Geneva Learning Foundation on Equity and HEART, I was really hoping that something like this would come up,” he said, “and lo and behold, I got an email inviting me for becoming Ambassador”. His advice to colleagues who felt too busy to keep up was direct: set aside one focused hour.
Do not try to do it in pieces.
“This process involves a lot of thinking,” he said, “and giving constructive feedback is very important, because nobody is perfect. We learn from each other so that we could be near perfect”.
Madonna, joining from the Philippines, where her first TGLF course had been the WHO Immunization Agenda 2030 program back in 2020, urged colleagues to go back and revisit their earlier work.
“Review what you have done for those courses so that it can refresh your memory,” she said.
“The questions are not that very complicated, but for us to learn from each other, it would be good to really be specific”.
Forming a global network: what people wrote when nobody was watching
The real texture of the Ambassador activation lives not in the live sessions but in the written work, the peer reviews and discussion forums submitted by Friday, where candidate Ambassadors tell their stories and give and receive feedback.
It is in these documents, often written late at night or between patient rounds, that the depth of commitment becomes visible.
Charlotte Mbuh described how a single TGLF program on data improvement planning transformed her own surveillance reporting in the South Region of Cameroon.
“Timeliness of surveillance data submission was below 30 percent, meaning that fewer than one in three health facilities was reporting on time,” she wrote.
Within three months of applying what she had learned through peer exchange, that number had risen to over 90 percent.
“This experience confirmed something I now know with certainty,” she continued.
“The most powerful solutions to data quality problems do not come from experts parachuted in from outside.They come from field professionals who understand the system”.
In Goma, in the conflict-racked eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, Patrick Amissi Djuma described learning how to reach vaccine-hesitant families through the Foundation’s programs.
He took what he learned into a meeting of community health workers during a vaccination campaign in March 2026.
“I understood that many parents had bad information about vaccines,” he wrote.
His intervention broke through the resistance.
In Kakuri, Kaduna State, Nigeria, Umar Abubakar described how the Teach to Reach program in 2025 taught him the “trusted messenger” and “listening first” approach.
“Before then, I mostly focused on giving instructions to communities about malaria prevention after floods,” he wrote.
Now he asks community members what changes they have noticed in weather, farming, and sickness before linking their observations to health risks.
“People became more open, started using mosquito nets more consistently, and reported symptoms earlier because they felt heard and respected”.
And then there was Rameaux Nkollo Mbachan from Cameroon, who works as a psychosocial counselor in an addiction treatment center.
Through the Foundation’s “Equity matters” program in September 2025, he discovered the “5 whys” methodology for root cause analysis.
“This approach was a true revelation,” he wrote.
“It gave me a simple and powerful tool to understand more quickly and in a structured way the origins of addiction among residents. By sharing this approach with my colleagues, we collectively improved the quality of our support”.
The art of reviewing each other in a global network
One of the most striking features of the Ambassador activation is the peer review process.
Candidate Ambassadors do not simply submit their work and wait for a grade from an authority figure.
They read each other’s stories, rate them on structured rubrics, and write detailed constructive feedback.
Then they respond to the feedback they receive, explaining what they will change and why.
The exchanges are remarkably candid.
Dr. Ndaeyo Iwot, a veteran Scholar from Nigeria who chairs the Regina Community Care Foundation, received a review that he felt did not engage with his actual submission.
He wrote a precise, point-by-point rebuttal explaining why each comment failed to address his work.
“The reviewer does not appear to have reviewed my presentation with full understanding,” he concluded, “and I suspect there may have been a mix-up”.
He dismissed neither the process nor the colleague.
He held both to a higher standard.
On the other end of the spectrum, Emmanuel Musa from Nigeria received feedback suggesting he add short-term progress indicators to his Ambassador plan.
His response was immediate and specific: “I will update my plan to include easy-to-track signals like check-ins completed, stakeholder engagement, and regular updates”.
This is not performative.
Beenish Mehboob, a Pakistani public health professional who has worked on polio eradication and now works in evaluation in the United States, gave one of the most detailed reviews in the English cohort, offering paragraph-length analysis of each colleague’s submission.
She connected their stories to her own field experience, pointed out structural gaps, and suggested concrete improvements.
When she received feedback of her own, she was equally honest about what she found to be its limitations, noting that one reviewer “acknowledged and appreciated the quality of my work” but offered nothing she could actually use to improve.
Just like in the real world, sifting through feedback
Recruiting one person at a time
In the coming weeks, candidate Ambassadors are asked to go out and recruit colleagues into the Foundation’s programs.
Many have already started.
The results, shared in discussion forums, read like field dispatches from a decentralized campaign.
Dr. Vikas Dubey from India reported speaking to 80 colleagues in his state and national routine immunization network.
Five signed up.
Fifty-six showed interest.
Jérémie Kasongo from the DRC talked to nine people and got four enrolled, using personal experience and WhatsApp messages rather than mass outreach.
Marius Muyabu, a young doctor in the DRC, described approaching five fellow physicians.
One signed up immediately.
The others said they needed time, worried the program would be too long.
“The challenge is not talking about the Foundation as an Ambassador,” Muyabu reflected, “but helping people continue and follow through with the training”.
Louise Nkusu Lusangu, a midwife from the DRC now living in Cape Town, South Africa, contacted 10 to 12 people.
Seven signed up.
She combined WhatsApp messages with direct phone calls, sharing her own motivation and experience to build trust.
Emelia Asare from Ghana kept it simpler: she spoke to five people during normal work interactions, and two enrolled.
“Keeping the conversation simple and relating TGLF to our daily work challenges made it easier for colleagues to understand,” she wrote.
“Do not over-explain. Keep it short, simple, and practical”.
Noelly Zola Watusadisi described colleagues sending her messages asking “When is that Foundation thing you told me about?” and “The window will not open!”
She helped them through each step.
Alphonse Kitoga from the DRC recruited two out of ten contacts and offered a philosophy for his fellow Ambassadors: “Learn, apply, share, and repeat. That is how our impact grows, little by little, but durably”.
The deeper current
What makes this movement unusual is the powerful emotion of leading change.
Noelly Zola described encountering colleagues who were considering dropping out.
“I reminded them of their importance within the Foundation,” she wrote.
“For those facing time constraints due to professional responsibilities, I shared my personal experience to demonstrate that it is possible to balance responsibilities while maintaining peer-to-peer learning.”
Some colleagues who were grieving the loss of a loved one “received moral and emotional support, which brought them significant comfort”.
She created small discussion groups in both English and French so that everyone could express themselves freely.
Annie Maloba, a teacher at a technical medical institute in Kamina, in the Haut-Lomami province of the DRC, holds twenty-six Foundation certificates.
She wrote about colleagues who thanked her for encouraging them to join: “Doctor Kimous Kabamba is grateful for the orientations and briefings I give him after each training, telling me, ’You are truly a good leader and a good coach’”.
She described learning about female genital schistosomiasis (FGS), a condition she had not known how to detect, and about the health consequences of climate change.
“I did not have enough knowledge about climate change,” she wrote.
“With the Geneva Learning Foundation, I understood that climate change brings many diseases that can lead to death”.
Marguerite Bosita from Kinshasa described using what she learned about equity in health to support street girls who are victims of sexual abuse.
Through a TGLF program, she adopted a participatory approach that “helped make initiatives more inclusive, relevant, and better accepted by beneficiaries”.
Dachollom Madu, a Nigerian health worker, wrote simply: “I learned how to express myself with confidence, knowing fully well that there are other colleagues who will guide me when I go astray. The experience I got from the training really helped me to make some changes in the way I care for my patients”.
The bet
On March 11, 2026, the sixth anniversary of the WHO’s pandemic declaration, the Foundation had convened its global alumni to launch this Ambassador activation.
The date was chosen with intention.
Six years earlier, the pandemic had shattered the routines of frontline health workers everywhere.
The Foundation’s COVID-19 Peer Hub, which grew from 600 to more than 6,000 participants in weeks, became proof that the most valuable knowledge often resides not at headquarters but in the communities.
Now the Foundation is asking its alumni to turn that proof into permanent infrastructure.
As of March 2026, 314 Ambassadors have been appointed across five countries: 167 in the DRC, 110 in Nigeria, 20 in Mali, 12 in Uganda, and 5 in Bangladesh.
The current activation will expand that number globally.
Active Ambassadors receive priority for scholarship-funded certifications and for paid facilitator positions.
But the real draw, evident in voice after voice and post after post, is harder to quantify: the sense that one’s daily experience, in a clinic in Kamina or a ward in Kaduna, has value that extends beyond the walls of that facility.
Reda Sadki, TGLF’s founder, told the March 30 session something that landed with weight.
“This is the highest function that you can attain as an alumnus or alumna of the Geneva Learning Foundation,” he said.
“Other Scholars will look to you as a model, as an example, as a leader”.
He was blunt about the stakes.
There are no shortcuts to significant learning, he explained.
Easy solutions to complex problems are likely to do more harm than good.
“Your first duty, our first duty, is do no harm”.
But he was also honest about the challenge ahead.
The Ambassadors are exceptional.
Most people are not.
The task now is to figure out, together, how to bring everyone on board.
“We need to figure out together how we are going to build something, a very large movement that includes everyone,” Sadki said.
“Including the people who say, ‘I do not have time for this, I do not have the energy for this, I do not see how this is going to help me put food on the table…’”.
The Foundation is making a bet that is either very small or very large, depending on how you measure it.
The bet is that trust, built slowly through shared learning, sustained through peer review and mutual accountability, extended through unstable internet connections and across time zones and languages, is more durable than any grant cycle.
That a midwife in Cape Town and a doctor in Goma and an epidemiologist in Ethiopia and a disease control officer in Ghana can hold each other up, not because someone is paying them to, but because they have come to believe that their experience is worth sharing, and that sharing it makes the entire network stronger.
On March 30, as the call wound down, Dr. Elizabeth Oduole, who had been struggling with a LinkedIn CAPTCHA for days, raised her hand one last time.
“I want to continue with my peers,” she said.
“I want to continue with all of you. If I could not, I would be a drawback”.
Charlotte Mbuh promised to help her.
Imran Ravji in Pakistan offered to call Faiza Rabbani, who had similar problems, to walk her through it.
Nobody asked them to.
That is how this works.
One hand reaching for another, across a screen, across a border, across the gap between what the global health system promises and what it delivers.
The gap is still enormous.
But the hands keep reaching.
References
- Reda Sadki (2006). A few of my favorite excerpts from George Siemens’s Knowing Knowledge (2006). Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/9sx23-hq479
- Reda Sadki (2022). What is the Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030)?. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/ymh0r-5a169
- 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 (2025). From diagnosis to duty: health workers confront their own role in inequity. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/khjjv-6et24
- Reda Sadki (2025). Retrouver les enfants congolais non-vaccinés: des acteurs de tout le pays lancent le premier Accélérateur zéro-dose pour renforcer la mise en oeuvre et le suivi. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/cbm45-y9j56
- Reda Sadki (2025). The practitioner as catalyst: How a global learning community is turning frontline experience into action on health inequity. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/0pa3j-2×058
- Reda Sadki and Charlotte Mbuh (2026). “Scholar one day, Scholar always”: Inside the last-mile global health network that runs on trust. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/0ansr-7tk79
- Reda Sadki and Charlotte Mbuh (2026). “We are the ones who are there every day”: How a global network of health workers is closing the last-mile gap. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/qrafe-qqn14
- The Geneva Learning Foundation (2026). Investing in our shared future: learning, equity, and solidarity. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/z7zsh-pjp89