In a rural health center in Kenya, a community health worker develops an innovative approach to reaching families who have been hesitant about vaccination. Meanwhile, in a Brazilian city, a nurse has gotten everyone involved – including families and communities – onboard to integrate information about HPV vaccination into cervical cancer screening.

Before, during, and after Teach to Reach on 20-21 June 2024, 21,398 health workers across the Global South—from veteran national managers to newly-trained community health workers—shared their unfiltered, frontline experiences of delivering care in an increasingly complex world.

Over 730 organizations have already confirmed their participation in Teach to Reach 11, a peer learning platform, network, and community for health workers facilitated by the Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF). This announcement came during TGLF’s first partnership briefing held on 16 October 2024.

Discussions at the World Health Summit in Berlin this week have rightly emphasized the role of health workers, especially those directly serving local communities. Health workers stand at the intersection of climate change and community health. They are first-hand eyewitnesses and the first line of defense against the impacts of climate on health. There is real horror in the climate impacts on health they describe.

“Do you have an experience supporting children affected by the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine that you would like to share with colleagues? Tell us what happened and how it turned out.

We need new ways to tackle global health challenges that impact local communities. It is obvious that technology alone is not enough. We need human ingenuity, collaboration, and the ability to share across borders and boundaries. That is why I am excited about Teach to Reach. Imagine if we could tap into the collective intelligence of over 20,000 health professionals working on the front lines in low- and middle-income countries.

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.

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.

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.

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.