The Geneva Learning Foundation Scholar Newsletter, issue 3 (7 May 2026)
Dear Reader
You can do three things this week that will change the way you work. Each one takes less than three minutes.
First, enroll today in the new malaria course. Need help to enroll? Watch the two-minute tutorial. It is built on what more than 1,000 health workers told us they are seeing in their own districts. You read their experience. You add yours. You leave with a clearer plan for three problems you will face this season.
📅 Second, save your seat for 14 May. This is the big monthly Teach to Reach event to meet, network, and learn. We show you how to find the TGLF certification that will help you progress your career. You get to hear success stories, lessons learned, and challenges from all over the world. Do you want to speak during this event? Use this link to register to join our Zoom studio.
Third, look below for five brand new certifications that opened since our last issue: menopause, the privatization of health care, newborn care, gender-based violence in emergencies, and One Health. Join us on 14 May 2026 to learn more about each new certification.
See you on 14 May,
Reda Sadki and Charlotte Mbuh
The Geneva Learning Foundation
PS Are you subscribed on YouTube? That is where you will find all our events. Go there to catch up, any time.
New certification: introduction to menopause
Menopause affects every woman who lives long enough. Yet in most health systems, it is invisible. No screening. No vocabulary. No budget. Women suffer in silence, and the system looks the other way. This new course is the first global peer learning programme on menopause for health workers, built with Menoglobal, the first international organisation dedicated to making menopause a global health priority. You learn alongside community health workers, midwives, nurses, and physicians from countries where the topic is still taboo. You leave with a way to talk about it in your own clinic, in your own language, and with peers you can call when a patient walks in tomorrow.
➡️ Learn more and enroll for this certification.
🗣️ Share your menopause story. You can write about a woman you cared for, a colleague, someone in your family, or yourself.
Help turn the tide to end malaria: do not miss our new malaria certification
You already see things in your district that the protocols do not describe. Mosquitoes biting in the day. Counterfeit medicine sold next door. Children who slept under a net and still fell sick.
The new course is called Turning the tide: learn from real-world health worker experience. It is the first malaria course built on the testimony of more than 1,000 health workers in 68 countries who told us what is actually working and what is not. You will read their experience, alongside colleagues from Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Kenya. You will write your own. You will leave with a clearer plan for three malaria problems you will face this season, and with the names of peers in your country you can message when the next outbreak comes.
If this is your first TGLF course and you want to see the path before you click, watch the two-minute walk-through of how to enroll. It shows the screens you will see, in order.
Did you miss it? Turning the tide is the malaria report this course is built on. It is free to download, written by the people who fight the disease. Read the report and meet its authors.
🗣️ Dr Kouamé Georges Konan, on the impact of malaria on his own family
➡️ Read what health workers from fifteen other countries said on World Malaria Day.
In Côte d’Ivoire, Dr Kouamé Georges Konan recently retired after a career as a departmental director of health. On 25 April, World Malaria Day, he spoke from his home.
“As I speak to you today, I am retired, that is true. But everyone around me has malaria and they are under treatment while I am here. Madame, my youngest daughter, right now, she is under treatment, malaria. Which is to say it is a current concern.”
A retired director of health, with malaria treatment running through his own family in 2026. The line between clinician and patient has not disappeared in the countries where the burden is heaviest, and that is exactly the knowledge the new malaria course is built on. Dr Konan is one of the colleagues you will hear from on 14 May.
📖 Eight things you can act on in malaria this week
➡️ Read the eight insights to end malaria.
A new short article distils the malaria report into eight practical insights you can use in your district before the end of the month, with the names and countries of the colleagues whose experience produced each one.
You will see why a single tool is fragile and why six tools used together change the curve. You will see why “store-bought” malaria medicine is the norm in many places, and what frontline workers say should change. You will see what climate is doing to mosquito behaviour where your colleagues work, in their own words.
✍️ New insights on the blog, if you have ten minutes between meetings
A short tour of what else we have published since our last newsletter, in case any of it is for you this week. Charlotte Mbuh wrote in African Vaccination Week that what communities are already teaching us about uptake is the answer hiding in plain sight, and the field has been slow to listen. We asked, in Measles as a test of trust, what two numbers tell us about how trust between communities and health systems is fraying, and what to do about it. And we read the CAGI report on the future of International Geneva and asked whether that future is being written by the people the international system is supposed to serve. Pick one.
🌍 Meet the Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education, new TGLF Partner
We have signed a three-year agreement with the Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education (GCCHE), based at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. GCCHE brings expert-led scientific education on climate and health. We bring the global network of practitioners who are already adapting their work to the climate they actually live in. ➡️ Read how the partnership will work, and who it is for.
For you this means three things. You can move from a TGLF course into a GCCHE course and back. The experience you share with us will inform what is taught at GCCHE. And the partners will run the Impact Accelerator, our 30-day cycle that helps you finish what you start, for selected cohorts.
If climate is hurting the health of the community you serve, two TGLF courses are open to you today. Learning together to lead change on the frontline of climate change and health is built around the experience of practitioners adapting their services to climate-driven health threats in their own districts. ➡️ Learn more and enroll for climate change and health certification. And One Health connects malaria, zoonotic disease, antimicrobial resistance, and climate-driven outbreaks as one problem in your community. ➡️ Learn more and enroll for One Health certification.
🗣️ Ask global experts your one question about climate change and health. Your question can shape what climate and health experts answer next.
When malaria, climate, and zoonotic disease are one problem in your district
One Health is the practical idea that malaria, zoonotic disease, antimicrobial resistance, and climate-driven outbreaks are not separate topics in your district. They are the same problem, looked at from different windows. This new primer is built around what frontline workers across the human, animal, and environmental sectors are already doing together when their formal mandates do not connect. You leave with one map of the connections in your own community, one plan to work with one other sector using resources you already have, and a cohort that will check in with you a month later.
➡️ Learn more and enroll for this certification.
🗣️ Share a lesson, success, or challenge when health, animals, climate, or environment came together as one problem. Your story names the connection your colleagues are starting to see.
📋 Three new certifications that opened since the last issue
Each of these is a problem your formal training probably did not cover. Each one is built around the experience of frontline workers who have lived the problem, and each one connects you to the peers working on it now. Pick one. Bring one colleague. If you would rather hear the five new courses introduced before you read about them, watch the short video roundup.
When private actors reshape your health system
Health systems everywhere are navigating the expansion of private actors. The consequences for equity, access, and accountability fall unevenly on the communities you serve, and most health professionals receive no preparation for that conversation. This new dialogue programme, Public good or private profit, is built in partnership with Public Services International (PSI), the global federation of trade unions representing more than 30 million workers in public services across 154 countries. You read what colleagues in low-, middle-, and high-income systems are doing when public services are restructured, contracted out, or replaced. You leave with one position you can defend in a public meeting, and a network of peers who will not let you defend it alone.
➡️ Learn more and enroll for this new certification.
Newborn care certification: when a baby’s first hour decides the rest
Most newborn deaths happen in the first 24 hours, and most are preventable with skills that can be taught. This new course, Newborn care foundations, is built on the practical actions community health workers, midwives, and nurses are already taking in the places where neonatal mortality is highest. You read their experience. You add your own. You leave with a sequence you can run when the next baby arrives, and a cohort of peers who are working on the same first hour in another country.
➡️ Learn more and enroll for Newborn care certification.
Introduction to gender-based violence risk mitigation: when a crisis hits, who is most at risk and who decides
Gender-based violence rises in every emergency, and most responders never receive the practical training to mitigate it. This new course follows the official Inter-Agency Standing Committee guidelines, but the dilemmas in it came from the people who live them: humanitarian responders, health workers, and community focal points working in active crises today. You leave with a referral pathway map for your location, a safety analysis of one service point, and a 30-day action plan you can start the week you finish. You also leave with the names of peers in other emergencies who are working the same problem.
➡️ Learn more and enroll for GBV risk mitigation certification.
📋 Last chance to enroll in the current cohorts
These three certifications were featured in our previous issues. The cohorts are already running, and the doors close soon. Each one is built on real-world challenges named by frontline workers, with peers already inside who will finish the cycle with you.
- Last chance to join the current cohort of NCDs in humanitarian settings, built with Dr Shanthi Mendis, retired senior adviser on noncommunicable diseases at the World Health Organization. Peers from active crises are mid-cycle. ➡️ Learn more and enroll for this certification.
- Last chance to join Our shared challenge of ageing, the primer on what the World Health Organization framework on healthy ageing looks like in your district. The next cohort will not start before the autumn. ➡️ Learn more and enroll for this certification.
- Last chance to join HEART, the step-by-step method to analyse a real inequity in your work, find the root cause, and finish with a project written up and ready to run. The cohort closes once the current cycle ends. ➡️ Learn more and enroll for this certification.
🎉 Celebrate ten years of TGLF, five years of Teach to Reach, five years of World Immunization Week
The Geneva Learning Foundation turns ten this year. Two anniversaries inside our tenth tell the story better than any retrospective we could write.
Five years ago, the first Teach to Reach was a single online event. Today it is a global network of frontline workers who keep showing up for each other between editions. The short history of those first five years, with a video of how the event grew from one room to seventy countries, is here: A short history of the first five years of Teach to Reach and the companion video.
Five years ago we also began collecting what World Immunization Week looks like in the words and images of the people who make vaccines work. This year we are not running a separate WIW event. Instead, we are marking five years of visual storytelling. The most recent Big Photo Books are open access and free to share: The many faces of immunization, and The who, what and where of immunization. The collection page holds them all.
Did you miss it? Read five years of visual storytelling by and for the people who make vaccines work, with the photos and the captions in the contributors’ own words.
🔜 What is coming next
Six monthly sessions, one registration. After 14 May, the next ones are 4 June, 2 July, 6 August, 3 September, and 1 October. Each session names a different challenge. Each session features different colleagues from the network. You register once, and you stay in for the year.
A new question is also taking shape. Artificial intelligence is already in many of your workplaces, in diagnostics, in data systems, and in the tools your colleagues use without official approval. We have published a first article on what it would take to design artificial intelligence to serve community health, instead of widening the gap. The AI4Health programme will follow.
Did you miss it? Read the article on artificial intelligence in community health.
🗣️ Share a lesson, success, or challenge from a time you used AI in your work. Tell us what you trusted, and what you did not.
For now, do one thing. Enroll today in the malaria course, and bring one colleague with you.
See you on 14 May.