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Geneva, 9 July 2026 (The GEneva Learning Foundation) – We are pleased to announce that Joseph WATO is the first Fellow of The Geneva Learning Foundation for the transformation of global health.
Joseph WATO: from the village to the board table
“You go to Geneva. You sit in all these meetings. How does that help me?”
A mother asked him this directly in a village in Cameroon, looking him in the eye.
Joseph WATO did not deflect the question.
He has spent his entire career building the answer.
The TGLF Fellowship is not an award.
It names a working relationship between people who have arrived, by different roads, at the same diagnosis of what is broken and the same conviction about what to do.
Joseph WATO is one of the small number of people in global health who holds, simultaneously, a board seat at two of the most consequential financing and technical institutions in the world and the daily practice of working with and for the communities those institutions are meant to serve.
He has documented, at close range, how decisions made in Geneva arrive in communities as programmes designed without the consent of the people they are supposed to protect.
He has spent over a decade fighting to close that distance.
“Those who do the work in the field do not have access to those who make decisions,” he told TGLF Founder Reda Sadki when they met at the Global Fund in May 2022. “And so we end up implementing decisions that are not adapted to what is actually happening.”
That sentence is the reason he is here.
In his own words
In accepting this invitation, Joseph WATO wrote: “From zero to hero for the communities that I serve, the Global Fund has given me the opportunity to be the voice of the voiceless by being one of the best and most inclusive global platforms that puts communities at the center of the discussions. It is always well to collaborate. When I saw the initiative of The Geneva Learning Foundation, I said to myself that it is always good to share and to see the axes of collaboration, how we can help each other. As soon as we find the center of interest for the people we want to reach, we have the key.”
TGLF Founder Reda Sadki said: “Joseph WATO began his career standing next to community health workers in the field and he did not forget what that felt like when he later took a seat at the Global Fund board. The leaders I want to learn from are the ones who carry both of those things at once: who can look a mother in the eye in her village and then walk into a board meeting and say what she actually needs, not what is easiest to fund. He has built organizations, coalitions, and board-level positions not as ends in themselves but as instruments for communities he refuses to stop speaking for. We are grateful he has agreed to walk into this work with us.”
TGLF President Karen E. Watkins, Professor of Learning, Leadership, and Organization Development at the University of Georgia, said: “Scholarship on organizational learning has long argued that the knowledge held by people closest to the work is the knowledge most essential to improving practice. Joseph Wato has not only lived that argument. He has built the structural capacity to carry community knowledge into the rooms where global health funding decisions are made. For TGLF as a learning organization, his Fellowship deepens our conviction that the system learns best when it learns with the people who are already there before the donor arrives and long after the project ends.”
From law school to the field, and back up again
Joseph WATO is a Cameroonian lawyer and international relations specialist.
As a law student, he told himself he would only ever take cases for people who could not afford one.
It took him longer than he expected to find the form that conviction would take.
Between 2015 and 2017, he supervised community health workers in Cameroon under a malaria Global Fund grant.
He went into the field with them.
He found families where a child was running a fever, where the nearest health center was ten kilometers away and there was no money for transport, where the mother looked at him and asked the question he would carry with him for years.
On supervision visits, when he asked why a child had not been brought to the clinic, the answer was almost always practical, not ideological: distance, cost, the time it takes to get there, the hospital’s habit of asking for payment before touching the patient.
In 2018, he joined Cameroon’s Country Coordinating Mechanism as a representative of malaria civil society organizations, learning the internal logic of how Global Fund resources flow from the board downward, and where that flow gets blocked before it reaches the people most in need.
By 2020, he had joined the Developing Country NGO Delegation to the Global Fund Board, representing NGOs from Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe and the Asia-Pacific region as one of approximately sixteen members of a delegation that holds a formal vote in one of the world’s most consequential health financing bodies.
In 2023, he was also appointed a Board Member of the RBM Partnership to End Malaria, representing civil society.
He leads COFIS-CSU, a coalition of more than 300 civil society organizations working on health financing and universal health coverage across Cameroon, he chairs SIDAF (an organization that he founded) and runs APDSP and PENASED, two civil society organizations working at the community level.
He is a member of CS4ME, CSEM-UHC2030, and the GFAN Africa Speaker Bureau.
In an interview with the Global Fund Observer published by Aidspan, he stated the organizing principle of his career plainly: “Malaria is born in the community, develops in the community and will also end in the community if the community takes real ownership of the fight against it.”
He is also a precise analyst of the structural conditions that make community ownership so difficult to achieve.
He has documented Cameroon’s public health investment declining from 5% to 3% of the national budget between 2023 and 2024, far below the 15% Abuja Declaration commitment.
He has argued, in board meetings and in community visits, that official malaria mortality figures are not simply wrong.They are structurally wrong: children die in villages before they ever reach a hospital, families bury them the same day, and the civil registration system that would record those deaths does not function at the community level.
The program says it is winning.
The graveyard says something else.
What drew us together
In January 2021, Joseph attended TGLF’s Teach to Reach Accelerator conference.
Learn more: A short history of the first five years o Teach to Reach
More than 7,500 vaccination professionals from African, Asian, and Latin American countries were present, getting ready to introduce new COVID-19 vaccines.
Partners from over 50 international agencies were in the room, listening and learning.
During a session, he typed a message in the chat: he would be in Geneva soon.
Could he meet with TGLF?
In a room of thousands, before any formal relationship existed, he reached out.
That is how Joseph WATO operates.
He identified a shared center of gravity before anyone offered him anything.
What he had recognized was that TGLF’s peer learning infrastructure was addressing the same fracture he had spent his career describing: the gap between those who do the work and those who make the decisions.
When TGLF showed that health workers who learn from each other move up to seven times faster than a similar group that does not, and that the knowledge driving those results is generated at the district and community level – neither imported nor rented – Joseph understood what that meant.
It was the argument he had been making in board meetings, now demonstrated in practice with measurable results.
He also carries a conviction about data that runs parallel to TGLF’s own research commitments.
When the national malaria program and the WHO publish different mortality estimates, neither wrong but both incomplete, he argues for triangulation: community-generated data about who died in which household, combined with epidemiological surveillance, to produce a more honest picture.
“The good data,” he says, “should be the compared data.”
This is the same argument TGLF makes when it insists that the experience shared by a health worker in a district meeting is a form of evidence, not an anecdote, and that the field cannot improve without treating it as such.
What comes next
Joseph will contribute to TGLF’s work as an adviser, a thought partner, and an advocate for TGLF’s model of peer learning with health workers as trusted advisers to communities.
He brings the accumulated knowledge of someone who has operated simultaneously at the community level and inside the governance structures that determine how resources flow to communities.
The questions he will help sharpen are not academic.
They are the questions a desk officer at the Global Fund, a country director in Yaoundé, a civil society coordinator in Kinshasa, or a community health worker in the Littoral region of Cameroon faces in the same week, often with no good answer available from the system around them.
- When global health funding shrinks and community programming is the first to be cut, how do you make the case, with evidence strong enough to survive a board conversation, that community-level investment is not a discretionary add-on but the mechanism through which all other investments reach people?
- When official data systems under-report mortality at the community level, as they do structurally in most malaria-endemic countries, what does a credible triangulation approach look like, and who in the system has the standing to insist that it be used?
- When civil society board representatives face travel budget cuts that prevent them from attending the meetings where decisions are made, how do you maintain political presence and the informal network relationships that make representation real rather than nominal?
- How does a peer learning network of more than 80,000 health workers at district and community level become a recognized, trusted source of bottom-up signals that can inform decisions at the Global Fund, at the RBM Partnership, and at country coordinating mechanisms, without being captured or distorted by institutional incentives?
- How do you connect community health workers across disease silos, those working on malaria with those working on immunization, on TB, on HIV, when the funding architecture keeps those silos separate and the meeting culture reinforces them?
- When a country’s public health investment falls well below the Abuja Declaration commitment, what does it take to shift that political priority from inside, and what role can global civil society networks and peer learning communities play in building the domestic constituency for change?
- How do you design learning programs that are co-constructed with the communities they are meant to serve, grounded in the realities of district and community practice, and credible enough to donors in the global north who have not yet learned to recognize community experience as evidence?
A note on TGLF’s Fellowship programme: building what matters, together
The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) began building its Fellowship programme in 2020. We have not spoken about it publicly until now. We wanted to invite people who share our commitment to education as a philosophy for change. We believe what matters when asking questions is not whether the evidence exists, but how the evidence reaches a community health worker in a flood zone, in the moment she has to act, with the resources she has at hand.
A number of leaders in health, humanitarian response, education, and policy have since accepted our invitation to become Fellows. Each joined because of shared conviction. We are grateful to each of them, and the relationships we have built together are among the most generative in our work.
This year we close our first decade and open our second. The Foundation that started in 2016 has grown into a network of 80,000 health and humanitarian workers in 137 countries, most of them at district and community level, who chose to learn differently, to lead locally, and to refuse the idea that change has to wait for the next expert to fly in. They built this. We did not. They did.
The second decade asks more of us, and of the people we work alongside. It is the right moment to make a Fellowship appointment public for the first time, and to begin to introduce the remarkable, eclectic group of leaders who have agreed to walk into this decade with us.
As we move into our second decade, we will introduce other Fellows, one at a time, when the moment and the context make it right. We thank each Fellow for their commitment, and we thank the 80,000 practitioners in the TGLF network whose work is the reason any of this matters.