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

The practitioner as catalyst: How a global learning community is turning frontline experience into action on health inequity

Reda SadkiGlobal health

“In this phase of my life, I want to work directly with the communities to see what I can do,” said Dr. Sambo Godwin Ishaku, a public health leader from Nigeria with over two decades of experience. His words opened the second day of The Geneva Learning Foundation’s first-ever peer learning exercise on health equity. They also spoke to the very origin of the event itself. The Geneva Learning Foundation’s Certificate peer learning programme for equity in research and practice was created because thousands of health workers like Dr. Ishaku joined a global dialogue about equity and demanded a new kind of learning—one that moved beyond theory to provide practical tools for action. This inaugural session on 9 September 2025, called “Discovery Day,” was a direct answer to that call. It was not a lecture, but a three-hour, high-intensity workshop where the participants’ own experiences of inequity became the curriculum. …

Remembering Joseph Ngugi

From Murang’a to the world: remembering Joseph Ngugi, champion of peer learning for community health

Reda SadkiGlobal health, Leadership

“What keeps me going now is the excitement of the clients who receive the service and the sad faces of those clients who need the services and cannot get them.” Joseph Mbari Ngugi shared these words on May 30, 2023, capturing the profound empathy and dedication that defined his life’s work. This commitment to serving those most in need—and his deep awareness of those still unreached—characterized not only his career as a senior community health officer and public health specialist in Kenya’s Murang’a County, but also his extraordinary five-year journey through the Geneva Learning Foundation’s most rigorous learning programmes. It was the morning of the first day of August, 2025. The message from his daughter was simple and devastating: “Hello this is Wanjiru Mbari Ngugi’s Daughter. I am the one currently with his phone. This is to inform you that Dad passed away this morning.” Joseph’s passing represents more than …

Climate change and health: a new peer learning programme by and for health workers from the most climate-vulnerable countries

Reda SadkiGlobal health

GENEVA, Switzerland, 23 July 2025 (The Geneva Learning Foundation) –Today, The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) announces the launch of “Learning to lead change on the frontline of climate change and health,” the inaugural course in a new certificate programme designed by and for professionals facing climate change impacts on health. Enrollment is now open. The course will launch on 11 August 2025. Two years ago today, nearly 5,000 health professionals from across the developing world gathered online for an unprecedented conversation. They shared something most climate scientists had never heard: detailed, firsthand accounts of how rising temperatures, extreme weather, and environmental changes were already devastating the health of their communities. The stories were urgent and specific. A nurse in Ghana described managing surges of malaria after unprecedented flooding. A community health worker in Bangladesh explained how cholera outbreaks followed every major storm. A pharmacist in Nigeria watched children suffer malnutrition …

WHO Global Conference on Climate and Health: New pathways to overcome structural barriers blocking effective climate and health action

Reda SadkiGlobal health

After the World Health Assembly’s adoption of ambitious global plan of action for climate and health, global and country stakeholders are meeting in Brasilia for the Global Conference on Climate and Health, ahead of COP30. Three critical observations emerged that illuminate why conventional global health approaches may be structurally inadequate for the challenges resulting from climate change impacts on health. These observations carry particular significance for global health leaders who now possess a WHA-approved strategy and action plan, but lack proven mechanisms for rapid, community-led implementation in the face of an unprecedented set of challenges. They also matter for major funders whose substantial investments in policy and research have yet to be matched by commensurate support for the communities and health workers who will be the ones to translate better science and policy into action. Signal 1: When funding disappears and demand explodes Seventy percent of global health funding vanished, …

What is the Impact Accelerator

What is The Geneva Learning Foundation’s Impact Accelerator?

Reda SadkiGlobal health

Imagine a social worker in Ukraine supporting children affected by the humanitarian crisis. Thousands of kilometers away, a radiation specialist in Japan is trying to find effective ways to communicate with local communities. In Nigeria, a health worker is tackling how to increase immunization coverage in their remote village. These professionals face very different challenges in very different places. Yet when they joined their first “Impact Accelerator”, something remarkable happened. They all found a way forward. They all made real progress. They all discovered they are not alone. The Impact Accelerator is a simple, practical method developed by The Geneva Learning Foundation that helps professionals turn intent into action, results, and outcomes. It has worked equally well in every country where it has been tried. It has helped people – whatever their knowledge domain or context – strengthen action and accelerate progress to improve health outcomes. Each time, in each …

20250717.PFA Accelerator article

PFA Accelerator: across Europe, practitioners learn from each other to strengthen support to children affected by the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine

Reda SadkiGlobal health

In the PFA Accelerator, practitioners supporting children are teaching each other what works. Every Friday, more than 240 education, social work, and health professionals across Ukraine and Europe file reports on the same question: What happened when you tried to help a child this week? Their answers – grounded in their daily work – are creating new insights into how Psychological First Aid (“PFA”) works in active conflict zones, displacement centers, and communities hosting Ukrainian families. These practitioners implement practical actions with children each week, then share what they learn with colleagues from all over Europe who face similar challenges. The tracking reveals stark patterns. More than half work with children showing anxiety, fear, and stress responses triggered by air raids, family separation, or displacement. Another 42% focus on children struggling to connect with others in unfamiliar places—Ukrainian teenagers isolated in Polish schools, families in Croatian refugee centers, children moved …

The funding crisis solution hiding in plain sight

The funding crisis solution hiding in plain sight

Reda SadkiGlobal health

“I did not realize how much I could do with what we already have.” A Nigerian health worker’s revelation captures what may be the most significant breakthrough in global health implementation during the current funding crisis. While organizations worldwide slash programs and lay off staff, a small Swiss non-profit, The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF), is demonstrating how to achieve seven times greater likelihood of improved health outcomes while cutting costs by 90 percent. The secret lies not in new technology or additional resources, but in something deceptively simple: health workers learning from and supporting each other. Nigeria: Two weeks to connect thousands, four weeks to change, and six weeks to outcomes On June 26, 2025, representatives from 153 global health and humanitarian organizations gathered for a closed-door briefing seeking proven solutions to implementation challenges they knew all too well. TGLF presented evidence from the Nigeria Immunization Agenda 2030 Collaborative that sounds almost …

When funding shrinks, impact must grow the economic case for peer learning networks-small

When funding shrinks, impact must grow: the economic case for peer learning networks

Reda SadkiGlobal health, The Geneva Learning Foundation

Humanitarian, global health, and development organizations confront an unprecedented crisis. Donor funding is in a downward spiral, while needs intensify across every sector. Organizations face stark choices: reduce programs, cut staff, or fundamentally transform how they deliver results. Traditional capacity building models have become economically unsustainable. Technical assistance, expert-led workshops, international travel, and venue-based training are examples of high-cost, low-volume activities that organizations may no longer be able to afford. Yet the need for learning, coordination, and adaptive capacity has never been greater. The opportunity cost of inaction Organizations that fail to adapt face systematic disadvantage. Traditional approaches cannot survive current funding constraints while maintaining effectiveness. Meanwhile, global challenges intensify: climate change drives new disease patterns; conflict disrupts health systems; demographic transitions strain capacity. These complex, interconnected challenges require adaptive systems that respond at the speed and scale of emerging threats. Organizations continuing expensive, ineffective approaches will face programmatic obsolescence. …

PanoramAI Reda Sadki artificial intelligence

The business of artificial intelligence and the equity challenge

Reda SadkiArtificial intelligence, The Geneva Learning Foundation

Since 2019, when The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) launched its first AI pilot project, we have been exploring how the Second Machine Age is reshaping learning. Ahead of the release of the first framework for AI in global health, I had a chance to sit down with a group of Swiss business leaders at the PanoramAI conference in Lausanne on 5 June 2025 to share TGLF’s insights about the significance and potential of artificial intelligence for global health and humanitarian response. Here is the article posted by the conference to recap a few of the take-aways. The Global Equity Challenger At the Panoramai AI Summit, Reda Sadki, leader of The Geneva Learning Foundation, delivered provocative insights about AI’s impact on global equity and the future of human work. Drawing from humanitarian emergency response and global health networks, he challenged comfortable assumptions about AI’s societal implications. The job displacement reality Reda …