During World Immunization Week, Gifty Akosua Adzigbey, an interpreter for the deaf community in Ghana’s Mankrong health district, shared a photo of her daily work.

She had spent the week, as she spent most weeks, moving between vaccination posts and households where parents with hearing disabilities needed a translator, and sometimes needed to be walked through the benefits of vaccines, in response to misinformation.

When she spoke about the photograph on The Geneva Learning Foundation’s World Immunization Week Celebration that week, she described it as an act of seeing. 

“Working and taking pictures of what I do, you know, sometimes you need to sit back and then assess your work,” she said. “You need to look at the photos. You can just analyze your work for the day, what went wrong, what must you do to help.”

Adzigbey was one of more than 8,700 people who work for health that registered in 2024 for this annual celebration.

The event ran simultaneously in English and French.

It has been running since 2021.

By 2024, it was drawing practitioners from roughly sixty countries, most of them working at what donor reports call sub-national levels: below the capital, beyond the paved roads, past the last reliable power supply.

In 2022, as part of the launch of the Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030), we asked what did World Immunization Week actually look like for the people who made it happen?

And we invited The Geneva Learning Foundation’s immunization community to share their own images.

The answer became a remarkable stream of photographs that no global health institution had commissioned and no donor had funded.

This is the story of how, in five Aprils and Mays, the vaccinators of the world began to tell their own visual story, and of why a small non-profit based in Geneva ended up being the place where it happened.

It is the story of a category error in global health: the assumption that the people closest to the work are the people who matter least to its narration.

By 2024, more than three thousand photographs had arrived from immunization staff in roughly sixty countries.

They had been taken on phones in clinics, on motorbikes, in pirogues on the Congo River, in displacement camps, in cold rooms, in waiting areas.

They had been taken by women and men whose names rarely appear in donor reports.

The cameras had been ordinary.

The decision to pick them up had not.

A spark of something

The first event, on 28 April 2021, contained no photographs.

None.

The archive of what later became the most distinctive feature of the celebrations begins in words and in a TGLF studio capped at five hundred participants that went over capacity within minutes.

The transcripts make this absence audible in retrospect, but at the time the absence had no name.

The format was challenge-sharing.

Reda opened by telling the hosts of an Immunization Agenda 2030 launch that the strategy itself, however ambitious, would only succeed if the people doing the work spoke first. “This event is going to be about you, about your challenges,” he said. “Before we talk about the strategy for 2030, we wanted to start with people who do the work daily of delivering vaccines, because it starts and at the end of the day, success or failure will rest upon what you do, and not only what you do, but also your leadership.”

What followed was, by the standards of the genre, unusual.

Joe Andreas Ateke, the deputy manager of Cameroon’s Expanded Programme on Immunization, described how community-based outreach had vaccinated more than 8,000 missed targets in 2020 in the country’s Northwest and Southwest regions, where armed conflict had pushed routine coverage below 50 percent.

Stephen Assobasi, in South Sudan, sketched a system in which 57 percent DTP3 coverage was running alongside 75 confirmed cases of circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2, measles outbreaks in sixteen counties, and a per-dose cost above ten US dollars, more than eighty percent of which was donor-financed.

From India, Dr. Aishwarya described migrant urban children dropping out of registers and needing to be tracked through surveillance data and street-level mobilisation.

Sintayehu Yeshaner, an Ethiopian working for WHO Nigeria, described local government areas with one trained health worker and outreach budgets that had been cancelled when COVID-19 vaccination took the transport money.

The challenges had been shared ahead of the event.

There were 1,847 of them, 941 in English and 906 in French, drawn from 4,769 registered participants.

Only a fraction were presented live.

The rest waited, written down, in the margins of a WHO online course about the world’s new strategy for immunization.

WHO’s Anne Lindstrand, sent a message that Charlotte Mbuh read into the closing minutes.

“IA 2030 was developed with thousands of immunization stakeholders like you,” it said. “It reflects exactly what you are telling today.”

This was the rhetorical signature of the event: a global decision-maker confirming that what was being said into the microphone in 2021 had already been said in committee in 2020, and that the strategy could now be cited as having heard them.

Charlotte, who had been locked out of the Zoom studio by a connectivity failure of her own, had to follow silently from Ebolowa, Cameroon for much of the event.

Her connectivity problem, treated by Reda and by the room with warmth rather than embarrassment, exemplified the constant challenge of connectivity.

This challenge did not prevent connection or meaning.

The hosts and the practitioners shared the same precariousness.

They simply did not all share it on the same side of the screen.

The next day, on 29 April 2021, the French event repeated the form for francophone health workers.

Reda spoke in French about the “Programme pour la vaccination à l’horizon 2030”.

Charlotte spoke about a community of more than 35,000 active francophone professionals already on the platform.

Gaston Forreau, from the Central African Republic, described a country one third of whose territory was occupied by armed groups and whose immunization coverage was holding only because community workers paid in goods, not in money, were carrying vaccines.

Reda closed the French event with a sentence that, on first reading, seems modest. “On espère vous laisser sur votre faim aujourd’hui. Pourquoi? Parce qu’aujourd’hui, elle amorce le lancement, l’étincelle de quelque chose.” 

We hope to leave you wanting more. Because today is the spark of something.

The spark would catch in the pivot to images.

These would make the nascent Movement for Immunization Agenda (IA2030) visible.

A year later, on 2 and 3 May 2022, the English and French celebrations returned, and photographs flowed in for the first time.

By the morning of the event, more than seven hundred immunization professionals had submitted over a thousand pictures from sixty-some countries.

By the close of the week, more than 1,000 had been received, and the back-end of the work, the captioning, the geolocating, the sequencing into a slideshow, had become its own small industry.

The introduction of the photographs into the celebration was not a strategic decision in the institutional sense.

It was a response to a question that had no obvious answer at the time: what does World Immunization Week actually look like for the people who make it happen?

The answer, as a stream of images, was uncomfortable for the conventional grammar of global health communication.

The photographs were not professional.

They were not framed.

They were sometimes blurry.

They sometimes contained nothing more than a vaccine vial on a metal table next to a registration book, or a refrigerator with a thermometer taped to its door, or a child’s foot.

They were, however, what the people behind them had decided was worth photographing about their own day.

Reda, introducing the first slideshow in 2022, named the principle that would carry the rest of the arc.

“Your story, the story of how immunization happens on the ground, is your story,” he told the room. “No one else can tell it in the way that you can by sharing what your daily work looks like.” 

The 2022 broadcasts also opened, deliberately, with the Women Who Deliver Vaccines Collective, a group whose existence had begun in March of that year.

Dr María Fernanda Monzón, a paediatrician from Corrientes in northern Argentina, was the first to speak. “Us being here matters,” she said. “Us being women who deliver vaccines matters. Us being together, learning from each other matters. We can and we will make a difference.”

The decision to give the opening slot to women was not symbolic in the soft sense in which that word is sometimes used in this sector.

It was a structural editorial choice, repeated every year.

The Femmes de la vaccination collective opened the francophone broadcasts as well.

Asta Monglo, a WHO-AFRO consultant in Brazzaville, described how the collective’s existence had altered her practice. “À chaque fois que je dois aider à élaborer un projet ou à élaborer une activité, ça me revient un peu de façon spontanée, est-ce qu’on a pris en compte l’aspect genre?” Each time she helped design a project, the gender question now arrived spontaneously.

Marie-Claudine Joseph-Bernard, a doctor at the Hôpital Saint-Boniface in Fond des Blancs, Haiti, was more direct. “S’il y a eu un poste de vaccination, vous allez voir 98 ou 99% de présence, ce sont les femmes.” If there is a vaccination post, ninety-eight or ninety-nine percent of the people who show up are women. “Donc les femmes sont beaucoup plus aptes à véhiculer les messages par rapport à la vaccination. C’est pourquoi les femmes peuvent changer les choses.” Therefore, women are far better placed to carry the message.

That is why women can change things.

The 2022 photographs were eventually compiled into a printed and digital book, the first Listening and Learning Report on the visual project, titled in English “It takes people to make #VaccinesWork.” A French companion volume followed.

What had begun as a small in-event slideshow had become a publication.

The publication had a DOI, giving it a place in the scholarly record that the photographs themselves had not asked for.

The vaccinators had become co-authors of a scholarly work.

Most had not, in any other professional setting, been called authors of anything before.

The francophone ledger

The transcripts of the bilingual events make a particular pattern visible only when read in pairs.

The francophone broadcasts, year after year, carry the more critical weight.

They contain the more sustained engagement with the limits of donor framings.

They contain the more detailed accounts of conflict and access.

They generate the testimony that punctures, without staging the puncture, the optimism of the official campaign tags.

In 2023, when the WHO and partner campaign tag was the Big Catch-Up, Moussa Traoré, a public health expert in the district of Douentza in Mali’s Mopti region, addressed the cliché head-on.

The catch-up of children missed during the pandemic, in his region, was in fact a question of access, not of confidence. 

“On n’a pas ce problème de réticence ou de refus par rapport à la vaccination dans ces zones,” he said of Mali’s conflict-affected centre and north. There was no problem of refusal in the zones where the security situation was most severe.

The barrier was geographic, infrastructural, military.

The dominant global narrative about hesitancy in fragile states was the wrong narrative for what he was facing.

Practitioners in the broadcasts kept saying versions of this.

Guillaume Goué Wamba, a logistician from the province of Equateur in the Democratic Republic of Congo, told the audience that, “Les enfants existent encore dans ces conditions jusqu’à aujourd’hui.” Children still existed in these conditions today, not as a fact about the past.

In 2024, when the campaign tag was #HumanlyPossible, a slogan launched by WHO and Gavi to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Expanded Programme on Immunization, it is true that not a single frontline speaker used it as a term of self-description.

What rose into the empty space the tag left was a different word, said on the francophone broadcast by Rudy Jacques Oudija, a Haitian logistics and cold chain specialist with thirty-five years of service. “Et malgré tout, les institutions arrivent quand bien même à vacciner les enfants.” And despite everything, the institutions still manage to vaccinate children.

“Malgré tout”, the French phrase for “despite everything”, was the counter-tag.

It was not triumphalist.

It was not optimistic.

It was the language of endurance, said by someone old enough to remember what the EPI had begun as.

Oudija went on to describe the first Haitian vaccination campaign in 1989. 

“C’était effectivement le geste d’amour parce que c’était des étudiants de l’école des infirmières, des étudiants de la faculté de médecine. C’était eux les volontaires pour faire la vaccination. Et ce qu’on leur attribuait comme garantie ou comme paix, c’était un plat de nourriture.” The first vaccinators were nursing and medical students. What they received in exchange for their service was a plate of food.

The Haitian memory was, in the entire 2024 corpus, the one moment when EPI50 received something other than a slogan.

The other moment came from Mame Sornofaï, a midwife at the Poutillac health post in Senegal, who had read the 2022 photo book and was reading the 2024 one when the broadcast began.

She gave the visual project, on the air, the most precise functional description it has yet received from a practitioner. 

“Ces photos, Reda, à chaque fois, je ne me lasse jamais de les regarder,” she said. These photos, every time, I never tire of looking at them. 

“Pourquoi? Parce qu’à chaque fois, ça nous montre qu’on doit encore faire plus d’efforts.” Because every time they show us we have to make still more effort. 

“Quand nous, on se plaint de 10 kilomètres qui nous séparent pour les zones à vacciner, on voit des gens à dos d’âne, à dos de charrette, à pied, qui marchent chaque jour pour aller vers leur objectif. Quand on les voit avec cette force et cet engagement, on n’a pas le droit de flancher, quoi.” When we complain about ten kilometres, we see colleagues riding on donkeys, in carts, walking. We have no right to flinch.

This was peer learning by photograph: comparative witness as a corrective to self-pity.

It was also the clearest evidence in the entire archive that the books were being read.

The function Sornofaï named is not visible in the conventional metrics of global health.

Charlotte prepared message in the same year acknowledged this directly. 

“These are not the carefully composed and technically accomplished shots of the professional photographer,” she read. “Rather, they capture a raw and authentic view of what immunization means in practice. This effect may be hard to quantify. On its own, it certainly does not directly improve vaccination coverage. It has everything to do with how health workers perceive themselves and perceive the value of their own work.”

It is unusual for an organisation to disclaim, on its own broadcast, that its flagship project has no measurable effect on coverage.

The disclaimer is what makes the rest of the claim credible.

The photographer outside

The decision to invite Chris de Bode, a Dutch documentary photographer with a substantial international portfolio, into the project was, in retrospect, the move that reframed the photography from a production into a practice.

De Bode appeared in 2023 as a guest.

By 2024, he was the foundation’s first Fellow of Photography and had run a workshop for 544 health workers from 44 countries ahead of World Immunization Week.

The workshop transmitted a small set of imperatives.

Be vulnerable.

Photography is about your relationship to the world around you.

Respect what or whom you photograph.

Introduce yourself.

Take time.

Return to places you have been before.

Give your story depth.

Charlotte translated these into French in the 2024 broadcast and folded them into the celebration as if they had always been there.

What de Bode said in 2023 had already given the project its sharpest external sentence.

He had been brought in as a witness from outside the global health sector, with no institutional stake in the IA2030 movement.

He was looking at the photographs as a working photographer.

“Most of the people who submitted the picture, they took a picture of what they do every day,” he told the room. “You decide what is important and not me being the professional photographer.

And that is what I really, really love about this exhibition, this project, and you, non-professional photographers, being involved and showing your images to the world.”

It was not a compliment in the polite sense.

He was naming an inversion of authority that, in the documentary tradition he came from, is rare.

Documentary photography normally proceeds from outside in: the photographer arrives in the field, decides what is significant, takes the picture, leaves with the negative, and shows it to a public elsewhere.

The TGLF project ran the camera the other way.

The subject became the photographer.

The photographer became the audience.

The audience became the colleagues who were doing the same work in another country.

By the close of 2024, the photographs had cumulatively reached enough of a public to be picked up by Gavi’s own communication channel.

“Saluting the immunisation workforce,” an article authored by Sadki and Mbuh, appeared on Gavi VaccinesWork in April of that year.

“Celebrating the vaccinators in pictures,” a review of the new photo book, written by Ian Jones, “The who, what and where of immunization,” appeared in September.

Gavi positioned the book within the formal EPI50 commemoration: vaccination has averted 154 million deaths over five decades, the article said, and the book gave a face to the work that produced that number.

The figure was the official one.

The faces, this time, were not.

Communion across time zones

The photographs were the visible artefact, but they were not the whole event.

The events themselves became, year by year, a particular kind of liturgy.

Charlotte and Reda read names off the chat.

They named cities and villagesaloud.

They called into the room, by name, individuals who had made it onto the screen and then ones who had not.

The cumulative effect, year over year, was that of a roll call held simultaneously across geographies and time zones.

By 2024, the closing slideshow displayed something of the order of seven hundred contributors’ faces in webcam grids before the curated photos began.

The grid was, structurally, a list of presence.

It was also a record of who was online at the same time as whom, on a Wednesday in May, at the end of an immunization week many of them had spent walking between health posts.

In 2023, eight thousand two hundred professionals registered for the bilingual celebrations between them.

In 2024, eight thousand seven hundred and thirteen, of whom 4,825 came to the English event and 3,888 to the French.

The bilingual structure was not a translation arrangement.

The two strands carried different conversations.

They overlapped, because the photos overlapped and many participants moved between the two, but they were not redundant.

The weighting of where the conflict and access testimony tended to come from, where the institutional self-criticism tended to land, where the EPI50 historical memory could be heard, varied across the two languages in ways the article record makes plain.

What the texture of the events also made plain was the asymmetry of presence.

The hosts were always available.

The participants were sometimes audible, sometimes not, sometimes called upon and unable to unmute, sometimes promised a chance to speak that the clock would not allow.

Some of the most important contributions of the entire archive went unheard at the events themselves.

Salimata Kantibo Diedou, in Senegal, and Roger Comelo, in the DRC, sent photographs in 2023 but lost their connections when called.

Their stories survived because the hosts read the captions out loud.

The inverse also happened.

In 2025, Dr. Mouzodi-Mounangouma, working in the Yumbi health zone in the Maïdombé province of the DRC, described five hundred islands strung along the river, the furthest more than four hundred kilometres from his base. 

“Nous sommes en train d’aller traquer ces enfants dans les îlots pour les vacciner.” We are going to track these children down on the islands to vaccinate them.

It was the kind of detail that the donor reports tend to compress into the phrase “hard-to-reach populations.” 

On the broadcast it was a sentence, said by the man whose job it was to find them.

What the photographs cannot do

Five years in, the limits of the project are worth naming.

The photographs do not prove that any vaccination programme is working.

They do not improve coverage.

They do not translate, in any clear arithmetic, into changes in the number of zero-dose children.

They do not, on any single example, win an argument with a finance ministry, a donor, or a parent who has been told that vaccines deformed her mother’s leg.

What they do, in the conditions of the work, is narrower and sharper.

They build evidence that there is a workforce.

They produce, year after year, a public record in which the workforce is visible to itself.

They give a midwife in Senegal a way to remember that her ten-kilometre walk is not the worst case.

They give a logistician in Mali a way of being seen by a logistician in Haiti.

They allow a polio survivor in the DRC, named Masumbuko, to be photographed and captioned by a colleague named Toya Kavouka Kouinzere, who told the 2024 audience why she keeps the picture circulating. 

“On l’utilise comme un élément qui nous aide à lever les réticences dans la communauté,” she explained. We use him as something that helps lift hesitation in the community. “Et quand il parle, c’est la maman qui accepte facilement, même s’il est réticent.” When he speaks, the mothers accept the vaccine.

The photo of Masumbuko is a documentation of what happened in the absence of vaccination.

The community pedagogy that follows works precisely because the failure is allowed to remain visible.

The photographs also produce, almost despite themselves, a particular form of political evidence.

In 2023, Wai Ling Ong, a WHO Myanmar staff member working between Northern Shan State and Rakhine State, sent a photograph that showed her smiling.

Asked why, she answered with the only sentence the global media has, on aggregate, failed to write about her country since 2021.

“At that time, our country is a democratic government. All the people, all the health workers as a doctor and nurses are very active, happy to serve the government at the time, so I was smiling at the time, very happily.” 

The photograph had been taken in the week before the military coup.

By the time it appeared on Reda’s slideshow, she was working in a system in which “the immunization coverage was nearly zero at the time. So we need to start from zero.”

It was a most powerful piece of contemporaneous documentation in the entire 2023 archive, and it would be unthinkable in any donor report.

In 2025, on the francophone broadcast, Dr. Kwachon Adrienne Banessa, a medical epidemiologist in the Mbanguay health district of Cameroon, described in plain language the operational consequences of social media misinformation.

“Nous nous retrouvons dans des communautés qui aujourd’hui sont tellement réticentes à la vaccination via les mauvaises informations venant des réseaux sociaux et tout le reste. Ce qui fait qu’on a beaucoup de difficultés à pouvoir entrer dans nos communautés et vacciner facilement des enfants dans cette communauté.” The communities she works in had become so reluctant to vaccinate, fed by social media misinformation, that simply entering them to vaccinate had become difficult.

She then described what had begun to shift the mood.

She had told the story of a child who had died of measles.

The story was true.

The story was hers.

The story was not, in the conventional sense, a piece of behaviour change content.

It was a peer narrative carried by a person the community already trusted. 

“Bizarrement, on a déjà des portes tellement ouvertes par rapport à cette vaccination. Tout le monde veut se faire vacciner.” Strangely, doors are now wide open. Everyone wants to be vaccinated.

The sentence is too neat to be the whole answer, but it is the answer the practitioner offered, and the broadcast did not interrupt her to qualify it.

Tradition as performance

The 2025 broadcasts are, read alongside their predecessors, the most institutionally self-aware of the five.

They are also the most fragile.

Reda opened the English session with a precise statistical frame.

Since 2021, he said, more than three thousand images had been shared.

The 2025 photos themselves had been narrowed to a slideshow of about two hundred.

It had become, he said, “officially a tradition,” a phrase he repeated in different formulations three times in English, and then in French, where it was rendered, more carefully, as a “consensus pour qu’on érige cette célébration comme tradition dans le domaine de la vaccination à partir de cette année.” A consensus to erect this celebration as a tradition in the vaccination space, starting this year.

To declare a tradition is to perform one into being.

The performance was not casual.

By April 2025, the global health funding environment had shifted in ways the broadcasts allude to without naming.

The sudden cuts of US Agency for International Development (USAID) funding earlier that year, the contraction of donor appetite for routine immunization, and the growing political pressure on vaccines in several G20 countries are not mentioned by name in the transcripts.

They are visible in two places.

They are visible in the structural signals: stock-outs of BCG vaccines and rotavirus diluents during World Immunization Week itself, reported by Fidel Chibonda-Moulangou from the Kandakanda health zone in the DRC’s Omami province, and a community of two hundred internally displaced persons discovered without any history of vaccination, with two measles deaths in a single family, reported by Dr. Cédric Fruits-Girard from the Ngambitica district in Cameroon.

They are visible, second, in what Reda said into the closing minutes of the English broadcast, to the several hundred people still on the line from Lagos and Niamey, Kabul and Lubumbashi.

“We actually considered not holding an event this year. And we are so glad that we did.”

David Afolabi, a retired Nigerian immunization officer who had been part of the platform across the arc, sent a message that was read into the close.

“After many years in services as immunization officer, my participation in the Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) could not be overemphasized because it built my confidence in presenting my cases on immunization activities to the political office holder, community stakeholder, NGO, and other,” it ran. “Now that I am retired, I feel glad and honored participating in the program.”

The voice of someone aged into and out of an immunization career, who had attended the broadcasts as an active officer and was now attending them retired, is the kind of voice that deserves to be heard.

It is the kind of voice that is, in the slow accumulation of a five-year archive, the evidence that the project produces.

Charlotte Mbuh’s closing message in the 2025 French broadcast did the corresponding work for the front of the career, not the back.

“Je tenais à rendre un hommage spécial à tous les professionnels de la vaccination de la santé qui se donne chaque jour dans des conditions difficiles pour s’assurer que toutes les communautés reçoivent les services de vaccination,” she said.I wanted to pay a special tribute to all the immunization and health professionals who give themselves each day, in difficult conditions, to make sure that all the communities receive vaccination services. 

“Au travers de vos expériences, au travers des images que vous avez partagées, nous apprenons.” Through your experiences, through the images you have shared, we learn.

The pronoun is plural and the tense is present.

What this story looks like from the outside

Global health partners did not build this.

They did not commission it.

They did not, in most cases, commit to it.

There is no joint funder framework that includes this World Immunization Week celebration in its line items, no donor evaluation that scores it, no peer-reviewed paper, in any of the journals that matter to the sector, that has examined the photographs as data.

Gavi has, twice, written in praise of it.

WHO has, on occasion, sent a written greeting that someone on the broadcast read aloud.

The leadership of the IA2030 partnership has not, in five years, attended the celebration in person.

None of this is hidden.

It is visible in the room.

It is also the central reason why the celebration exists.

The work that the global structure had been unable to organise had to be organised by someone else.

What that someone else organised, in the form it took, has more than one antecedent.

It is recognisably a peer learning practice in the lineage of Paulo Freire and the popular education tradition.

It is recognisably a citizen journalism practice in the lineage that Henry Jenkins and others have written about.

It is recognisably, also, a workforce visibility project of the kind that the labour movement has been doing for two centuries.

None of those traditions, on their own, is the right frame.

The vaccinators are not students and they are not journalists.

They are practitioners whose authorisation to narrate their own work has, for most of the post-war development era, sat with people who did not do it.

The photographs claim a small piece of that authorisation back, on terms the practitioners themselves set.

The claim is low-cost and high-implication.

The cameras are phones.

The submission process is an online form.

The publication channels are a public repository and a YouTube channel.

The total annual budget of the operation is rounding error in any of the major immunization partners’ accounts.

What the operation produces is something that could not be produced by other means: a public, citable, multilingual, dated, peer-validated visual record of who is actually doing the work of immunization in roughly sixty countries, in their own framing.

The under-recognition of the operation by the global health establishment is not an accident of attention.

It is structural.

The operation does what the customary distributors of legitimacy in this sector are not set up to do.

What it would mean to act on this

Four practical implications follow for ministries, donors, and platform partners.

The photographs are evidence in their own right.

They are a body of practitioner-generated documentation about the conditions of immunization work, contributed by named individuals, dated, geolocated, and published with stable identifiers.

The professional habit of treating images as illustration rather than as data is a habit that the photo books of the last five years have already disqualified.

If practitioner testimony in numeric form is admitted into an immunization evaluation framework, practitioner testimony in visual form should be admitted on the same terms.

The bilingual structure is not a translation arrangement.

The francophone strand, year after year, generates the more critical and more historically grounded testimony.

The anglophone strand generates the more vivid individual incident reports.

The reflex, in many global health institutions, to treat the English event as the main event and the French as its echo, would, in the corpus of these five years, get the analysis backwards.

Whoever reads the archive should read both halves.

The operation is, on the evidence of 2025, not safe.

It came close to not happening.

It was preserved by the institutional commitment of one small organisation, hosted by two people, and by the willingness of several thousand professionals to log on for an hour at the close of the working day.

If global immunization partners want the practitioner workforce to keep speaking publicly on its own terms, the partners should consider whether the lightweight infrastructure that allows that speech is one they should help carry.

Doing so does not require taking it over.

It requires, more modestly, recognising that the place this happens is The Geneva Learning Foundation, and that the absence of the place would be felt before its presence is.

The photographs themselves should be read.

They are, all of them, openly accessible.

The English collection of the most recent book is at the foundation’s photo book page.

The French collection is at the companion page.

The Listening and Learning reports are available in TGLF’s online repository.

The cumulative archive is approximately three thousand images.

It will take an evening to look through.

It will take longer to absorb.

Some of the work of the next decade of immunization will be done by the people who took those photographs.

The reading is, in that sense, due diligence.

Closing

The five years of the World Immunization Week celebration at The Geneva Learning Foundation are now a small archive.

It holds the voices of perhaps fifty thousand registered health professionals, a few thousand of whom shared photographs, several hundred of whom spoke on the broadcasts, and a small number of whom have said the sentences the archive will be remembered by.

In 2021 there were no photographs, only challenges.

In 2022 the photographs arrived and the format changed.

In 2023 an outside photographer told the room that the room had been right about authorship all along.

In 2024 a Haitian logistician with thirty-five years of service named the affective theory of his work in a single sentence.

La vaccination, c’est un geste d’amour.

Vaccination is an act of love.

In 2025 the host disclosed, into a closing screen, that the event he was hosting had nearly not happened.

The moment that disclosure deserves is a small one.

In a sector that, over five decades, has built its self-image on numbers averted, deaths prevented, courses completed, and budget cycles renewed, the choice not to cancel a single annual broadcast is, on the surface, trivial.

It is also the moment at which the sector’s habit of writing the practitioner workforce out of its own story can, by accident or intention, be reversed.

The vaccinators photographed themselves.

They have been doing it for five years.

The question for the next five is whether anyone outside the broadcast is willing to look.

References

Jones, I. (2024, September 24). Celebrating the vaccinators in pictures. Gavi VaccinesWork. https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/celebrating-vaccinators-pictures

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