The following is an edited transcript of oral remarks delivered by Reda Sadki on 26 April 2026, on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of Teach to Reach. The text has been lightly tidied for clarity, grammar, and flow.
Teach to Reach is a peer learning platform, network, and community hosted by The Geneva Learning Foundation TGLF). Launched in January 2021, it has grown into a multilingual gathering where frontline health and humanitarian workers, policymakers, researchers, and global partners meet, network, and learn together around urgent challenges such as immunization, climate change and health, malaria, neglected tropical diseases, gender equity, and humanitarian response. Teach to Reach is one of three complementary pedagogical patterns developed by Reda Sadki, TGLF’s founder, alongside the peer learning exercise and the Impact Accelerator.
Together, these models operationalize Sadki’s learning theory, which posits that active knowledge production, structured emergence, networked accountability, and scale as a driver of quality form a complete learning ecosystem. On this fifth anniversary, Reda Sadki traces the origins of Teach to Reach, describes how it works before, during, and after the live event, and situates it within the Foundation’s broader system for turning peer learning into measurable impact on health outcomes.
A focus on human connection in the age of AI
My focus today is on Teach to Reach, although there is, of course, the broader history of the Geneva Learning Foundation behind it.
What we have been chasing after for a long time is really this question: in the digital age, and now in the age of AI, how do we build meaningful connections that help us better understand what it means to be human, and better understand what we, as humans, can do to face these critical threats?
Teach to Reach 11 and the umbrella of topics
The last Teach to Reach was Teach to Reach 11.
This is one of the posters from the event.
What works best to describe it, I think, are two phrases we use.
One is “meet, network, and learn.” The other is simply “peer learning by and for people who work for health.”
Teach to Reach has become a broad umbrella for a range of topics and challenges that matter to health and humanitarian workers.
At Teach to Reach 11, for example, the idea that health workers are on the front lines of climate change and health, side by side with the communities they serve, was really central.
That focus has evolved, grown, and developed over the years.
Origins in the COVID-19 pandemic
Teach to Reach, the conference, started in January 2021.
It came out of a program we ran in 2020 that aimed to improve immunization training.
What we found interesting was the momentum that built up around leadership for learning, which we know is a key driver of performance.
By the end of 2020, in the middle of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, we had a group of more than 900 health and humanitarian workers who created what they called the Global Leadership Council for Learning and Leadership, focused at that time on immunization.
Of course, these health workers were getting ready to introduce COVID-19 vaccines in their countries.
The first conference in January 2021 was therefore focused on COVID-19 vaccine introduction and on connecting health workers around these issues.
We had an organizing committee of more than 300 members.
On a purely voluntary basis, literally hundreds of facilitators took on responsibility for organizing one or more sessions.
We had, I think, over 50 sessions with partners joining from all over the world, and for that first event, over 7,500 participants.
The surprise that created Teach to Reach Connect
What struck us was a small feature of the platform.
You could press a button and connect with a peer for a five-minute conversation, and you could extend that conversation if you wished.
When we counted up the attendance on the different sessions, people clearly appreciated them.
They were all well attended.
But the surprise was that there were over 14,000 networking meetings across the three days of the conference.
That led us to create what we then called Teach to Reach Connect.
We said, let us do away with the sessions built around presentations and discussion, and simply give people what they want, which seemed to be this need for networking opportunities and private one-to-one conversations.
The first Teach to Reach Connect had around 2,000 to 3,000 participants, and it has grown ever since.
You can see the growth curve from 2,604 participants in March 2021, all the way to 24,610 participants at Teach to Reach 11 in December 2024.
Who participates
Who are these participants?
When we say “people on the front lines,” this is what we mean.
Most work in health facilities and districts.
About half work for government and half for civil society.
About half are francophone, because the event is held in English and in French, and we are working on a Spanish version.
Many work in remote rural areas, and almost half serve the urban poor.
More than a third directly support the needs of nomadic and migrant populations.
A quarter work with refugees or internally displaced populations, and one in five work in places where there is an active armed conflict.
Why the model works
We believe that the startling growth in attendance, level of participation, and contributions reflects the power of peer learning.
It is not just about showing up for a Zoom call.
There are tangible ways to contribute.
Participants have described how their mind’s eye opens through peer dialogue, through learning together in conversation.
We also believe there are benefits for organizations.
There is a network of organizations, as well as a network of individuals, that has grown up around Teach to Reach, with a distinct set of benefits on the organizational side.
An alternative to the webinar
We are all familiar with the webinar format: someone presents, and then there is time for questions and answers.
We wanted an alternative that would place the experiences of health and humanitarian workers at the center.
Broadly, the workflow runs from what we call Teach to Reach Questions all the way to certification.
There is a before, a during, and an after to Teach to Reach.
Many people focus on the live event, because that is what we can grasp most easily.
We are all there at the same time, and it is emotionally powerful.
But it is unlikely to be where the most significant learning happens.
Before Teach to Reach
Three things happen before Teach to Reach.
First, you answer Teach to Reach Questions.
These are formulated to encourage you to share your direct experience, not your opinion about, say, malaria, but something you have actually experienced or done and that you consider worth sharing with your colleagues.
Second, you get to participate in special events.
For example, we have run sessions on leadership to end malaria, across different themes and occasions, and we will continue to do that.
Third, and this is key, peer learning does not work if you are by yourself.
So the third step is inviting colleagues from your organization and your networks.
If you go it alone, you will not get very far with peer learning.
Most of the significant learning actually happens through these processes that start before the live event.
During Teach to Reach
During Teach to Reach itself, there are plenary sessions, one-to-one networking (which was the reason for starting Teach to Reach Connect), and workshops and sessions led by partners, experts, and, in some cases, community members themselves.
We typically start Teach to Reach with a warm-up and a tutorial, to respond to digital literacy gaps.
Not everyone is like fish in water with these digital platforms.
The opening ceremony marks that this is a formal moment.
We want to recreate the emotional power you feel when, for example, you attend a concert and your favorite musician comes on stage.
That is what we aim to recreate at the opening.
We then frame participants not as learners, beneficiaries, or recipients of peer learning, but as leaders and partners.
That is key to setting the tone.
During the Leaders and Partners Forum, we also share tangible outputs, such as the Women Inspiring Women book and course.
That book brings together 177 women from the Teach to Reach community, sharing their insights and experiences, speaking to their daughters and to other young women who aspire to a career in health or humanitarian work.
The REACH Network
At Teach to Reach 10, we launched the REACH Network: Relate, Engage, Act, Connect, and Help.
We had realized that many of the people attending Teach to Reach are themselves leaders in their communities and leaders of organizations, primarily locally led organizations.
The REACH Network has grown into a network of more than 4,000 organizations of all kinds.
Access is very open, but recognition is based on actually being there, making a contribution, bringing learning back to your organization, and inviting colleagues to join.
We have found this to be very powerful in terms of recognition, community growth, and, fundamentally, recognizing leadership.
“Meet, network, and learn” is therefore core to Teach to Reach.
There are specific sessions, some in small groups, some one-to-one, that recreate the same opportunity we first saw back at Teach to Reach 1, when we counted 14,000 networking meetings.
Thematic and country sessions
There are also thematic sessions.
Our largest communities are from Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and many of them run their own activities.
They are not waiting for the Geneva Learning Foundation to do things together.
We now have country groups in 24 countries, formed by alumni, and an active network of ambassadors.
Nigeria, for instance, gets its own session, not because we are privileging one country over another, but because of the dynamic and level of engagement on the ground.
Every Teach to Reach is incremental and builds on the preceding one.
The RBM Partnership to End Malaria session, for example, built on an earlier session we did without global partners, with health workers and what became the REACH Network as our core partners on community engagement.
Climate change and health
On an issue like climate and health, we work with global partners such as Grand Challenges Canada, but we work with them in order to better serve the community.
We started working on climate change and health in 2023 in response to the community’s own expressed need.
Health workers were telling us they were seeing frightening things.
Within climate and health, we also emphasize a holistic approach, and under the same umbrella, we included a focus on climate and neglected tropical diseases.
In July 2023, we held the first special event on climate and health.
It was almost a Teach to Reach in its own right. 4,700 health and humanitarian workers responded.
Most described themselves as part of the family, or a trusted friend, of the community they serve.
In a sample of 1,234 people (a funny number, but that is what it was), we asked whether climate change is a threat to the health of the community they serve.
The majority gave a high threat level, and 606, almost half, gave the highest threat level.
From event to insights to curriculum
When the community comes together like this, the outputs are what we call insights reports.
These reports, again, are by and for the community, and we give them back.
There was so much valuable information in the first climate and health report that we built the Certificate Peer Learning Program for Leadership in Climate Change and Health, specifically to help health and humanitarian workers make sense of that large report and put the knowledge to use in their own context.
We now have an entire program, and you can start today with the first course, called Learning Together to Lead Change on the Frontline of Climate Change and Health.
Outputs are for the community
Typically, somewhere between 1,500 and 3,000 experiences are shared for each Teach to Reach.
It depends on the questions we ask and on where the community is at.
Our Insights team curates these experiences and produces what we call Shared Experiences, a compendium organized by country and by theme, which we share back with the community.
This matters, because a lot of learning can be extractive.
If we were a data collection firm, it would be very interesting to gather thousands of health worker experiences and sell them to customers.
In our case, the ‘customer’ is the community.
That is with whom we share back everything we learn.
It is by and for the community.
Outputs are not an end in themselves.
Through the Knowledge to Action Hub, they lead to different paths to action.
After Teach to Reach
After Teach to Reach, you share what you have learned with your organization, moving again from the individual level to the organizational level.
We have built the Knowledge to Action Hub as a support system to help you apply new ideas.
If you heard a great idea about vaccine hesitancy at Teach to Reach, the Knowledge to Action Hub scaffolds and supports you to apply that idea to your own context.
Then there is certification.
What we recognize is your contribution to Teach to Reach.
We do not certify attendance.
We certify that you have actually shared an experience, or that, after Teach to Reach, you have shared your reflections on your participation in the event.
The Impact Accelerator
Knowledge and learning are never, for us, an end in themselves.
That is why, in July 2019, we built what we call the Impact Accelerator.
It uses project-based and problem-based learning, focused on a challenge you actually face in the real world, and on building a project to respond to it.
In July 2019, we ran the first Accelerator with close to 500 health workers.
In global health, we develop action plans all the time.
But the devil is in the details, and in execution.
So we developed the central component of our learning system.
It is not Teach to Reach.
Teach to Reach is the spark.
If you make enough sparks, you get a fire.
What you do with the fire is apply it to implementation challenges.
In January 2020, we showed three things.
- First, participants in the Accelerator progressed seven times faster toward implementation, and toward documenting tangible improvements in health outcomes, compared to a group that had technical support or training but no Accelerator.
- Second, the Accelerator cost roughly 90 percent less than technical assistance or traditional capacity building for implementation.
- Third, in Côte d’Ivoire, working with the Ministry of Health on a Gavi-supported project, we had health workers from 85 percent of the country’s districts. 82 percent continued to use the Accelerator methodology for their own needs, and 78 percent said, “Thank you very much, I do not need any further assistance from the Geneva Learning Foundation.”
So Teach to Reach is one piece of a larger learning system.
It is an important piece, but what happens after Teach to Reach, inside the Accelerator, is ultimately what matters most.
Five years on: looking ahead
That is a little of the history, in a nutshell, of five years of Teach to Reach.
We will be holding the fifth anniversary event this year, although we have not yet set the date.
What we have done is to hold, on Thursday, a Teach to Reach event focused on malaria.
It was not a full Teach to Reach, but it built on the rich collection of health worker experiences we have compiled across eight themes in our malaria activities.
We have turned that collection into an insights report, where you can read what health workers said about each theme and see the patterns across a very large volume of shared experience.
We have also turned it into a peer learning course where you can learn from real-world health worker experiences.
You can enroll right now.
A growing curriculum, rooted in community
Alongside Teach to Reach, we are able to grow a curriculum that is organically grounded, rooted in the communities where health and humanitarian workers operate, often in the most climate-vulnerable places and the most complex contexts.
Alongside malaria, we have new courses on One Health, connecting people, animals, and the environment.
We continue to offer Learning Together to Lead Change on the Frontline of Climate Change and Health.
We have collaborated, for example with Save the Children, on children’s health in the climate crisis.
This is how we are celebrating our first 10 years.
The launch of our second decade means massively expanding and opening new programs, courses, and opportunities.
We have grown in confidence that someone who starts with a primer course, continues through a peer learning exercise, and then enters an Accelerator, will move seven times faster, grow intellectually as a leader, strengthen their capabilities on the ground, and ultimately bring remarkable results for the communities they serve.
We are extending into non-communicable diseases.
We still have, and will continue to have, a strong focus on gender equity and equity more broadly.
Women Inspiring Women started as a book and is now a course.
Mitigating Gender-Based Violence in Practice launches on 4 May.
We also offer Gender and Emergencies: A Rapid Introduction.
On equity, we have developed our own methodology called Human Equity Action Reflection Transformation.
We are also expanding into aging, the decolonization of global health, and the privatization of healthcare, while continuing to nurture the immunization community.
Why this approach, in a world of knowledge abundance
You could say that there are plenty of online courses available pretty much wherever you look.
What makes these different?
In a world of knowledge abundance, you can find reliable information on pretty much any topic.
With AI, you can ask questions and get semi-reliable answers, and the reliability is improving very fast.
So what is left for education?
We believe it is human connection.
Peer learning networks are, we believe, key to our survival: the ability to make connections among us as human beings, and to experience, enjoy, and blossom within them.
Ultimately, that is what each of these courses is about.
The idea is that you leave with a stronger network, with new connections, and with new people who share your passion and commitment.
Staying connected
Finally, some practical information.
For participants with poor connectivity, we have a podcast.
It is not one of those podcasts where two people sit at a microphone and say interesting things.
It is all of our live stream content in an audio format, so that people for whom video is expensive can still be part of the conversation.
We are also on all the usual social media channels.
If you type “The Geneva Learning Foundation” pretty much anywhere, you should be able to find us.
I am happy to say more in the conversation, but I really look forward to the dialogue.
I hope this has not been too long.
Thank you.
References
This is a list of key articles on this blog about Teach to Reach.
- Reda Sadki (2023). Digital bridges cannot cross analog gates. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/srvap-txc24
- 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). Ahead of Teach to Reach 11, organizational leaders share experience of ‘what works’ for health. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/q16vx-f6g16
- Reda Sadki (2024). Become a Teach to Reach 10 Partner: Help amplify frontline voices at the world’s largest health peer learning event. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/5vk56-hz285
- Reda Sadki (2024). Can Teach to Reach help your organization?. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/x3kp1-g5m71
- Reda Sadki (2024). Experiences shared at Teach to Reach 10. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/6b5tt-g0385
- Reda Sadki (2024). Teach to Reach’s new leadership network connects health organizations tackling common challenges. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/ck6fp-xya49
- 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 become a Teach to Reach Partner?. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/wep23-25a44
- Reda Sadki (2024). Why participate in Teach to Reach?. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/cs2dx-0yr25
- Reda Sadki (2024). You are not alone: Health workers are sharing how they protected their communities when extreme weather hit. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/5v5sb-2r816
- Reda Sadki (2026). How do we measure the value of peer learning for malaria national programme staff?. Reda Sadki: Learning to make a difference. https://doi.org/10.59350/ect8s-1xv35