Old poison in new bottles

How do we stop AI-generated ‘poverty porn’ fake images?

Reda SadkiArtificial intelligence, Global health

There is an important and necessary conversation happening right now about the use of generative artificial intelligence in global health and humanitarian communications. Researchers like Arsenii Alenichev are correctly identifying a new wave of “poverty porn 2.0,” where artificial intelligence is used to generate stereotypical, racialized images of suffering—the very tropes many of us have worked for decades to banish. The alarms are valid. The images are harmful. But I am deeply concerned that in our rush to condemn the new technology, we are misdiagnosing the cause. The problem is not the tool. The problem is the user. Generative artificial intelligence is not the cause of poverty porn. The root cause is the deep-seeded racism and colonial mindset that have defined the humanitarian aid and global health sectors since their inception. This is not a new phenomenon. It is a long-standing pattern. In my private conversations with colleagues and researchers …

State of AI report

What the 2025 State of AI Report means for global health and humanitarian action

Reda SadkiArtificial intelligence, Global health

The 2025 State of AI Report has arrived, painting a picture of an industry being fundamentally reshaped by “The Squeeze.” This is a critical, intensifying constraint on three key resources: the massive-scale compute (processing power) required for training, the availability of high-quality data, and the specialized human talent to build frontier models. This squeeze, the report details, is accelerating a consolidation of power. It favors the “hyperscalers”—the handful of large technology corporations that can afford to build their own power plants to run their data centers. For leaders in global health and humanitarian action, the report is essential reading. However, it must be read with a critical eye. The report’s narrative is, in many ways, the narrative of the hyperscalers. It focuses on the benchmarks they dominate, the closed models they are building, and the resource problems they face. This “view from the top” is valuable, but it is not …

Empower Learners for the Age of AI conference

The great unlearning: notes on the Empower Learners for the Age of AI conference

Reda SadkiArtificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is forcing a reckoning not just in our schools, but in how we solve the world’s most complex problems.  When ChatGPT exploded into public consciousness, the immediate fear that rippled through our institutions was singular: the corruption of process. The specter of students, professionals, and even leaders outsourcing their intellectual labor to a machine seemed to threaten the very foundation of competence and accountability. In response, a predictable arsenal was deployed: detection software, outright bans, and policies hastily drafted to contain the threat. Three years later, a more profound and unsettling truth is emerging. The Empowering Learners AI 2025 global conference (7-10 October 2025) was a fascinating location to observe how academics – albeit mostly white men from the Global North centers that concentrate resources for research – are navigating these troubled waters. The impacts of AI in education matter because, as the OECD’s Stefan Vincent-Lancrin explained: “performance in education …

Pour retrouver les enfants congolais non vaccinés, il est question des fumoirs à poisson et du dialogue inter-religieux

Reda SadkiGlobal health

Au deuxième jour de leurs travaux en direct, les professionnels de la santé congolais sont passés de la découverte à l’exploration des causes profondes qui laissent des centaines de milliers d’enfants exposés aux maladies évitables par la vaccination. Ils découvrent que les racines du problème sont souvent là où personne ne les attend: dans l’économie de la pêche, le dialogue avec les églises ou la gestion des camps de déplacés. Lire également: En République démocratique du Congo, la traque des enfants « zéro dose » passe par l’intelligence collective des acteurs de la santé Les analyses, plus fines, révèlent des leviers d’action insoupçonnés, démontrant la puissance d’une méthode qui transforme les soignants en stratèges. « La séance d’hier, c’était une séance de découverte, mais aujourd’hui, c’était une séance d’exploration. Explorer, c’est aller en profondeur. Il faut sonder ». Ces mots de Fidèle Tshibanda Mulangu, un participant congolais, résument la bascule …

En République démocratique du Congo, la traque des enfants « zéro dose » passe par l’intelligence collective des acteurs de la santé

En République démocratique du Congo, la traque des enfants « zéro dose » passe par l’intelligence collective des acteurs de la santé

Reda SadkiGlobal health

KINSHASA et LUMUMBASHI, le 7 octobre 2025 (La Fondation Apprendre Genève) – « Ces jeunes filles qui ont des grossesses indésirables, quand elles mettent au monde, elles ont tendance à laisser les enfants livrés à eux-mêmes », explique Marguerite Bosita, coordonnatrice d’une organisation non gouvernementale à Kinshasa. « Ce manque d’informations sur les questions liées à la vaccination se pose encore plus, car ces enfants grandissent exposés à des difficultés de santé ». Sa voix, émanant d’une mission de terrain dans la province du Kongo Central, s’est jointe à des centaines d’autres ce 7 octobre 2025. Il s’agissait de la deuxième journée d’un exercice d’apprentissage par les pairs de 16 jours visant à identifier et à atteindre les enfants dits « zéro dose » en République démocratique du Congo (RDC). Ce sont ces centaines de milliers de nourrissons qui n’ont reçu aucun vaccin pour les protéger de nombreuses maladies. Pour …

Colonization, climate change, and indigenous health from Algiers to Acre

Colonization, climate change, and indigenous health: from Algiers to Acre

Reda SadkiGlobal health

I sat in a conference hall in Rio Branco, Acre State, Brazil. My mind was in a sanatorium of Algiers, Algeria. This was where my mother was sent as a girl. They told her she got tuberculosis because she was an “indigène musulman”. In 1938, the year of my mother’s birth and after over a century of colonization, about 5 out of every 100 Algerian people got infected with tuberculosis each year. French colonial reports show that Algerians died from tuberculosis at much higher rates than French settlers. They claimed the disease was endemic due to the supposed inferiority of our people. And that she was going to die. Colonialism is a liar. She survived. And it took less than eight years for an independent Algeria, free of the scourge of colonialism, to eradicate the scourge of TB. Listening to the leaders at Brazil’s First National Seminar on Indigenous Health …

Gender in emergencies

Gender in emergencies: a new peer learning programme from The Geneva Learning Foundation

Reda SadkiGlobal health, Leadership

This is a critical moment for work on gender in emergencies. Across the humanitarian sector, we are witnessing a coordinated backlash. Decades of progress are threatened by targeted funding cuts, the erasure of essential research and tools, and a political climate that seeks to silence our work. Many dedicated practitioners feel isolated and that their work is being devalued. This is not a time for silence. It is a time for solidarity and for finding resilient ways to sustain our practice. In this spirit, The Geneva Learning Foundation is pleased to announce the new Certificate peer learning programme for gender in emergencies. We offer this programme to build upon the decades of vital work by countless practitioners and activists, seeing our role as one of contribution to the collective effort of all who continue to champion gender equality in emergencies. Learn more and request your invitation to the programme and its first …

The crisis in scientific publishing from AI fraud to epistemic justice

The crisis in scientific publishing: from AI fraud to epistemic justice

Reda SadkiGlobal health, Leadership

There is a crisis in scientific publishing. Science is haunted. In early 2024, one major publisher retracted hundreds of scientific papers. Most were not the work of hurried researchers, but of ghosts—digital phantoms generated by artificial intelligence. Featuring nonsensical diagrams and fabricated data, they had sailed through the gates of peer review. This spectre of AI-driven fraud is not only a new technological threat. It is also a symptom of a pre-existing disease. For years, organized networks have profited from inserting fake papers into the scholarly record. It seems that scientific publishing’s peer review process, intended to seek truth, cannot even tell the real from the fake. These failures are not just academic embarrassments. In fields like global health, where knowledge means the difference between life and death, we can no longer afford to ignore them. Indeed, the crisis in scientific journals is not, at its heart, a crisis in …

How practitioners in Ukraine and across Europe built a self-sustaining peer learning network to support children

How practitioners in Ukraine and across Europe built a self-sustaining peer learning network to support children

Reda SadkiGlobal health

When military fathers started arriving at her centre in Bulgaria, sharing challenges they faced with their own children, Irina V. found herself drawing on lessons learned not from textbooks, but from conversations with fellow practitioners scattered across a war zone. “What I learned about providing psychological first aid (PFA) to children actually helped me in working with parents of children in crisis,” Irina explained during a recent video call with professionals across Europe supporting children affected by the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine. That call was the first annual meeting of an entirely volunteer-driven network of practitioners – some working within kilometres of active combat – who teach each other how to better support children. This network emerged from an innovative certificate peer learning programme supported by the European Union’s EU4Health programme, developed by The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). …

Certificate peer learning programme for equity in research and practice

From diagnosis to duty: health workers confront their own role in inequity

Reda SadkiGlobal health

A thirteen-year-old girl in Nigeria, bitten by a snake, arrived at a hospital with her frantic family. The hospital demanded payment before administering the antivenom. The family could not afford it. The girl died. This was one of the stark stories shared by health professionals on September 10, 2025, during “Exploration Day,” the third day of The Geneva Learning Foundation’s inaugural peer learning exercise on health equity. The previous day had been about diagnosing the external systems that create such tragedies. But today, the focus shifted. “Yesterday, we looked at the problem,” said TGLF facilitator Dr María Fernanda Monzón. “Today, we look in the mirror. We move from analyzing the situation to analyzing ourselves, our own role, our own power, and our own assumptions”. The practitioner’s role The day’s intensive, small-group workshops challenged participants to move beyond naming a problem to questioning their own connection to it. Groups brought their …