Aerial view of a flooded urban residential area of Dera Allah yar city in Jaffarabad District, Baluchistan Province, Pakistan. Credit: Gavi/2022/Asad Zaidi

Ten eyewitness reports from the frontline of climate change and health

Reda SadkiGlobal health

The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) has created a platform enabling health workers to describe the impacts of climate change on their local communities. Here are ten of the most striking reports. Published on 30 November 2023 on the Gavi #VaccinesWork blog. Written by Ian Jones for Gavi. In July 2023, more than 1,200 health workers from 68 countries shared their experiences of changes in climate and health at a unique Geneva Learning Foundation event designed to shed light on the realities of climate impacts on the health of the communities they serve. A special TGLF report – On the frontline of climate change and health: A health worker eyewitness report – includes a compendium and analysis of these 1,200 health workers’ observations and insights. Here are ten of the most striking. Samuel Chukwuemeka Obasi, who works for the Ministry of Health in Abuja, Nigeria, has noticed big changes to the …

TechNet conference how to to open access to global health conferences-small

What did we learn from the Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030) in its first two years?

Reda SadkiGlobal health, Innovation, The Geneva Learning Foundation

At a World Health Organization conference in Panama, The Geneva Learning Foundation is hosting an Innovations Café today. The session’s title is “Connected learning to accelerate local impact at global scale: Year 1 of the Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030)”. What is the Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030)? Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030) is the world’s strategy, adopted by the World Health Assembly in 2020, to achieve the global goals for immunization. In March 2022, The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) launched a call to form a movement in support of IA2030. By June 2023, over 16,000 health workers were participating. More than 80% work in districts and health facilities and over half are government workers. 70% work in fragile contexts such as armed conflict, remote areas, urban poverty, and other challenges. This ground-up commitment has the potential to complement the top-down work of the IA2030 global partners, if this …

Le Lac Tchad

Why an open-source manifesto for global health?

Reda SadkiGlobal health, Global health, The Geneva Learning Foundation

Lire la version française: Pourquoi un manifeste open-source pour la santé globale? The global immunization community is now focused on “the big catch-up”, dealing with recovery of immunization services from the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, as countries – and immunization staff on the frontlines – work toward the goals of Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030). At the Seventy-Fourth World Health Assembly, the Director General of the World Health Organization had called for “a broad social movement for immunization that will ensure that immunization remains high on global and regional health agendas and help to generate a groundswell of support or social movement for immunization”. A Movement is larger than any one individual or organization. The Geneva Learning Foundation is one of many working to support this Movement. In March 2022, we launched a call for immunization staff at all levels of the health system to connect across boundaries of geography …

Le Lac Tchad

Pourquoi un manifeste open-source pour la santé globale?

Reda SadkiGlobal health, The Geneva Learning Foundation

Read this in English: Why an open-source manifesto for global health? La communauté mondiale de la vaccination se concentre désormais sur le « grand rattrapage », en priorisant le rétablissement des services de vaccination suite aux conséquences de la pandémie de COVID-19, alors que les pays—et le personnel de la vaccination en première ligne—s’efforcent d’atteindre les objectifs du Programme pour la vaccination à l’horizon 2030 (IA2030). Lors de la soixante-quatorzième Assemblée mondiale de la santé, le directeur général de l’Organisation mondiale de la santé avait lancé un appel en faveur d’un « vaste mouvement social pour la vaccination qui veillera à ce que la vaccination reste une priorité dans les programmes de santé internationaux et régionaux et contribuera à susciter une vague de soutien ou un mouvement social en faveur de la vaccination ». Un mouvement est plus grand qu’un seul pays ou une seule organisation. La Fondation Apprendre Genève est l’une des nombreuses …

Credible knowers

Credible knowers

Reda SadkiGlobal health, The Geneva Learning Foundation, Thinking aloud

“Some individuals are acknowledged as credible knowers within global health, while the knowledge held by others may be given less credibility.” – (Himani Bhakuni and Seye Abimbola in The Lancet, 2021) “Immunization Agenda 2030” or “IA2030” is a strategy that was unanimously adopted at the World Health Assembly in 2020. The global community that funds and supports vaccination globally is now exploring what it needs to do differently to transform the Agenda’s goal of saving 50 million lives by the end of the decade into reality. Last year, over 10,000 national and sub-national health staff from 99 countries pledged to achieve this goal when they joined the Geneva Learning Foundation’s first IA2030 learning and action research programme. Discover what we learned in Year 1… Learn more about the Foundation’s platform and network… What is the Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030)? In global health, personal experience is assumed to be anecdotal, the …

What is the Geneva Learning Foundation and what do we do?

Reda SadkiThe Geneva Learning Foundation

What we do and how we do it have both changed rapidly since we launched the Impact Accelerator, the key component Geneva Learning Foundation’s learning-to-action pathway. We catalyze large scale peer networks of frontline actors facing critical threats to our societies.  To learn more about the Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF), download our brochure, listen to our podcast, view our latest livestreams, subscribe to our insights, and follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Or introduce yourself to our Partnerships team.

What is the Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030 IA2030

What is the Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030)?

Reda SadkiGlobal health

The Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030) and the Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030 represent two interconnected but distinct aspects of a global effort to enhance immunization coverage and impact. What is Immunization Agenda 2030? Immunization Agenda 2030 or “IA2030” is a global strategy endorsed by the World Health Assembly, aiming to maximize the lifesaving impact of vaccines over the decade from 2021 to 2030. Watch the Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030) inaugural lecture by Anne Lindstrand (WHO) and Robin Nandy (UNICEF) What is the Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030? The Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030, on the other hand, is a collaborative, community-driven effort to operationalize the goals of IA2030 at the local, national, and global levels. It emerged in response to the Director-General’s call for a “groundswell of support” for immunization and combines a network, platform, and community of action. The Movement focuses on turning the commitment to IA2030 into locally-led, …

How do we shift our capacity to embrace a volatile, complex world?

Reda SadkiThinking aloud

This week, the Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) is Devex’s “Presenting Partner”. We are proud to be sharing with Devex’s 170,000 NewsWire subscribers the remarkable progress and the results, outcomes, and impact we have achieved since the pandemic hit. Discover how we connect people, organizations, and communities to achieve collective impact better and faster… Get in touch… We stand ready to support any organization or network that needs to mobilize people at scale in support of meaningful change. We are seeking partners that share our yearning for transformation, and that can bring their challenges, resources, and capabilities to make this yearning a reality. We are actively fundraising to develop our global platform so we can support more partners tackling ‘wicked’ problems. The need for change is evident. Is your organization rethinking how it contributes to achieving global goals? Humanitarian INGOs headquartered in Geneva, London, or Washington are striving to “localize aid”. …

Social network and citation network in the COVID-19 Peer Hub

Disseminating rapid learning about COVID-19 vaccine introduction

Reda SadkiGlobal health, Global health, Learning strategy

In July 2019, barely six months before the pandemic, we worked with alumni of The Geneva Learning Foundation’s immunization programme to build the Impact Accelerator in 86 countries. This global community of action for national and sub-national immunization staff pledged, following completion of one of the Foundation’s courses, to support each other in other to achieve impact. Closing the loop from learning to impact produced startling results, accelerating the rate at which locally-resourced projects were implemented and fostering new forms of collaborative leadership. Alumni launched what immediately became the largest network of immunization managers in the world. Then the pandemic dramatically raised the stakes: at least 80 million children under one were placed at risk of vaccine-preventable diseases such as diphtheria, measles and polio as COVID-19 disrupted immunization service as worldwide. Alumni were amongst the first in their countries to respond, leveraging the power of being connected to each other …

Solidarity across public health and medicine silos during a pandemic

Reda SadkiEducation business models, Global health, Global health, Learning strategy

We are launching a new Scholar programme about environmental threats to health, with an initial focus on radiation. (I mapped out what this might look like in 2017.) As part of the launch, we are enlisting support of immunization colleagues. Our immunization programme is our largest and most advanced programme, and still growing fast since its inception in 2016. At The Geneva Learning Foundation, we have spent 5 years pouring mind, body, and soul into building what has become the largest digital platform for national and sub-national immunization leaders. Along the way, we discovered that it is not only about scale. Social Network Analysis (SNA) by colleagues Sasha Poquet and Vitomir Kovanovic at the Centre for Complexity and Change in Learning is now helping us to understand the power in the relationships not just one-to-many but many-to-many across the network. Yes, there is a linkage as most vaccines are for …