How Teach to Reach can help your organization

Can Teach to Reach help your organization?

Global health

Teach to Reach stands as a unique nexus in the global health landscape, offering unprecedented opportunities for diverse stakeholders to engage, learn, and drive meaningful change. With over 60,000 participants from more than 90 countries, this platform, network, and community bring together a mix of frontline health workers, policymakers, and key decision-makers. At Teach to Reach, research institutions and academic researchers engage health workers to translate their findings into policy and practice For research institutions and academic partners, Teach to Reach provides a site for knowledge translation. It provides direct access to practitioners and policymakers at all levels, enabling researchers to share findings with those best positioned to apply them in real-world settings. The platform’s interactive features, such as “Teach to Reach Questions,” allow for rapid data collection and feedback, helping bridge the gap between research and practice. At Teach to Reach, global agencies can listen and learn with local …

Teach to Reach 11 Call for Partners

Why participate in Teach to Reach?

Global health

In global health, where challenges are as diverse as they are complex, we need new ways for health professionals to connect, learn, and drive change. Imagine a digital space where a nurse from rural Nigeria, a policymaker from India, and a WHO expert can share experiences, learn from each other, and collectively tackle global health challenges. That’s the essence of Teach to Reach. Welcome to Teach to Reach, a peer learning initiative launched in January 2021 by a collection of over 300 health professionals from Africa, Asia, and Latin America as they were getting ready to introduce COVID-19 vaccination. Four years later, the tenth edition of Teach to Reach on 20-21 June 2024 brought together an astounding 21,389 health professionals from over 70 countries. Discussion has expanded beyond immunization to include a range of challenges that matter for the survival and resilience of local communities. What makes this gathering extraordinary …

Brevity’s burden The executive summary trap in global health

Brevity’s burden: The executive summary trap in global health

Global health, Learning strategy

It was James Gleick who noted in his book “Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything” the societal shift towards valuing speed over depth: “We have become a quick-reflexed, multitasking, channel-flipping, fast-forwarding species. We don’t completely understand it, and we’re not altogether happy about it.” In global health, there’s a growing tendency to demand ever-shorter summaries of complex information. “Can you condense this into four pages?” “Is there an executive summary?” These requests, while stemming from real time constraints, reveal fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of knowledge and learning. Worse, they contribute to perpetuating existing global health inequities. Here is why – and a few ideas of what we can do about it. We lose more than time in the race to brevity The push for shortened summaries is understandable on the surface. Some clinical researchers, for example, undeniably face increasing time pressures. Many are swamped due to underlying structural issues, …

Gavi Zero-Dose Learning Hub Recommendations to support knowledge translation of evidence to identify and reach zero-dose children

Recommendations to support knowledge translation of evidence to identify and reach zero-dose children

Global health

This article is excerpted from the Gavi Zero-Dose Learning Hub publication “Knowledge Translation for Zero-Dose Immunization Research”. In its role as the Learning Innovation Unit (LIU) lead, The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) conceptualized a baseline strategy for knowledge translation (KT). TGLF developed the following recommendations to support the Country Learning Hubs’ (CLH) KT work.  The recommendations are intended to improve the use of evidence generated by research, ensuring it effectively informs practices, policies, and interventions targeting vaccine equity. Each recommendation is accompanied by a rationale and example. Together, these recommendations aim to build a robust and efficient approach to KT that maximizes the impact of research findings on identifying and reaching ZD and UI children, ultimately contributing to improved immunization equity. This toolkit provides researchers with a list of steps for planning for KT with guiding Table 1. KT Recommendations from TGLF Recommendation Example Perform a rapid capacity audit for …

Gavi Zero-Dose Learning Hub peer exchange for knowledge translation

Gavi Zero-Dose Learning Hub’s innovative model for inter-country peer learning and knowledge translation

Global health

This article is excerpted from the Gavi Zero-Dose Learning Hub publication “Knowledge Translation for Zero-Dose Immunization Research”. The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) hosted the first ZDLH Inter-Country Peer Learning Exchange session (ZDLH-X), in May 2023 with a focus on Bangladesh and Mali. The second online peer learning exchange, ZDLH-X2, in September 2023 focused on Nigeria and Uganda. The ZDLH-X events were the centerpiece of a mini learning program that includes three general steps. Through this process, TGLF identified stories to be featured in a January 2024 ZDLH webinar event. The stories reveal how practitioners in Bangladesh, Mali, Nigeria, and Uganda are developing local solutions to increase equity in immunization. The peer learning events provide a framework for addressing the complex problem-solving required to address the ZD challenge. The ZDLH-X approach uses multidisciplinary participation, narrative-based mental model building, peer inspiration, reflective sessions, and collaborative activities to address multidimensional challenges like reaching ZD children. Watch …

The Nigeria Immunization Collaborative what happened after just two weeks

The Nigeria Immunization Collaborative: Early learning from a novel sector-wide approach model for zero-dose challenges

Global health

Less than three weeks after its launch, the Nigeria Immunization Collaborative – a partnership between the Geneva Learning Foundation, the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA), and UNICEF – has already connected over 4,000 participants from all 36 states and more than 300 Local Government Areas (LGAs). The Collaborative is part of the Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030). In the Collaborative’s first peer learning exercise that concluded on 6 August 2024, over 600 participants conducted root cause analyses of immunization barriers in their communities. Participants engaged in a two-week intensive process of analyzing immunization challenges, conducting root cause analyses, and developing actionable plans to address these issues. They did this without having to stop their daily work or travel, a key characteristic of The Geneva Learning Foundation’s model to support work-based learning. Watch the General Assembly of the Nigeria Immunization Collaborative on 6 August 2024 What are health workers …

Experience-sharing sessions in the Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030- A novel approach to localize global health collaboration

Experience-sharing sessions in the Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030: A novel approach to localize global health collaboration

Global health

As immunization programs worldwide struggle to recover from pandemic disruptions, the Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030) offers a novel, practitioner-led approach to accelerate progress towards global vaccination goals. From March to June 2022, the Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) conducted the first Full Learning Cycle (FLC) of the Movement for IA2030, engaging 6,185 health professionals from low- and middle-income countries. A cornerstone of this programme was a series of 44 experience-sharing sessions held between 7 March and 13 June 2022. These sessions brought together between 20 and 400 practitioners per session to discuss and solve real-world immunization challenges. IA2030 case study 16, by Charlotte Mbuh and François Gasse, offers valuable insights from these experience-sharing session: Download the full case study: IA2030 Case study 16. Continuum from knowledge to performance. The Geneva Learning Foundation. For every challenge shared during the experience sharing sessions, there was always at least one member who …

What is norms shifting in immunization and global health

What is norms-shifting in immunization and global health?

Global health

The concept of “norms shifting perspective”, in the field of immunization and global health focuses on strategies that aim to alter norms and attitudes towards vaccination to promote uptake and acceptance. This perspective acknowledges the influence that social norms have on individuals decisions regarding vaccination. Aims to utilize this insight to enhance acceptance through well crafted policies, messaging and interventions. The goal is to make vaccination the expected and socially endorsed choice across communities Here are a few aspects of this perspective. Recognizing the influence of social norms on vaccination behavior: Using accurate information about norms to increase acceptance: Shaping norms through public policy: Designing targeted interventions: Considering unintended consequences: Adapting to local contexts: Taking a long-term view: Where to learn more about norms-shifting in immunization? Bardosh, K., De Figueiredo, A., Gur-Arie, R., Jamrozik, E., Doidge, J., Lemmens, T., Keshavjee, S., Graham, J.E., Baral, S., 2022. The unintended consequences of …

Community-based monitoring for immunization

Integrating community-based monitoring (CBM) into a comprehensive learning-to-action model

Global health

According to Gavi, “community-based monitoring” or “CBM” is a process where service users collect data on various aspects of health service provision to monitor program implementation, identify gaps, and collaboratively develop solutions with providers. By engaging service users, CBM aims to foster greater accountability and responsiveness to local needs. The Geneva Learning Foundation’s innovative learning-to-action model offers a compelling framework within which CBM could be applied to immunization challenges. The model’s comprehensive design creates an enabling environment for effectively integrating diverse monitoring data sources – and this could include community perspectives. Health workers as trusted community advisers… and members of the community A distinctive feature of TGLF’s model is its emphasis on health workers’ role as trusted advisors to the communities they serve. The model recognizes that local health staff are not merely service providers, but often deeply embedded community members with intimate knowledge of local realities. For example, in …

Heini Utenen OpenWHO confusion about methods and learner preferences

Why asking learners what they want is a recipe for confusion

Global health, Theory

A survey of learners on a large, authoritative global health learning platform has me pondering once again the perils of relying too heavily on learner preferences when designing educational experiences. One survey question intended to ask learners for their preferred learning method. The list of options provided includes a range of items. (Some would make the point that the list conflates learning resources and learning methods, but let us leave that aside for now.) Respondents’ top choices (source) were videos, slides, and downloadable documents. At first glance, this seems perfectly reasonable. After all, should we not give learners what they want? As it happens, the main resources offered by this platform are videos, slides, and other downloadable documents. (If we asked learners who participate in our peer learning programmes for their preference, they would likely say that they prefer… peer learning.) Beyond this availability bias, there is a more significant …