When the road went, the midwife stayed on the line
People who work for health met on 2 July 2026 at Teach to Reach 15. That was the fifteenth edition of the world’s largest peer learning event, where more than 80,000 frontline workers share what is actually happening where they work – and what actually helps improve health.
What did we learn together? We publish six new Teach to Reach stories from health and humanitarian workers in Senegal, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nepal, Uganda, and Saudi Arabia. Start with any of the articles. Or read all six.
In Kolda, in southern Senegal, the rains took the tracks that pregnant women used to reach the health centre.
Every antenatal appointment stopped.
Malick Ndome could not rebuild the road and could not move the women, so he moved something else.
What he did cost almost nothing, and somebody still had to pay for it.
Who paid, and what that says about every solution like it.
Lillian Mutua counts a flood differently from a meteorologist.
She coordinates health promotion for Nairobi City County, and she started with more than 100 dead in the central business district.
Then she kept going, into the losses that only show up weeks later, in the bodies of people who were never in the water.
In Nepal, Deepanjali Shrestha has watched dengue change address.
In Riyadh, Kaiser Parvez treated men collapsing in 55-degree heat, then reached for his own wallet.
Three people who saw it before the data did.
Alidor Kayembe, a nurse in Kasaï central, knows the malaria season the way you know your own street.
Dry season down, rainy season up.
A thousand kilometres away, Noelly Zola stood in that same dry season and watched cases climb anyway.
Then a colleague in Katanga said the thing that quietly undoes a national bed net campaign.
The sentence was seven words long.
Benoît Beya gave the room a number, and then he stopped talking.
More than 17 doctors dead in the current Bundibugyo virus disease outbreak, he said, and more nurses.
He is a physician in Kasaï central, and he was not asking for equipment.
Across the border in Uganda, Saidu Ainebyoona named what has to move faster than the virus.
Ten accounts like these were read aloud, one by one, to the thousand health workers who had written them.
Then they were asked what surprised them.
Tina Iroghama Agbonyinma, a field worker in Nigeria, said nothing had, and she was not being modest.
Lul Omar Ulusow, who runs maternal health for a region of Somalia, said something that stayed with the room until the end.
The afternoon, in the words of the people who were in it.
Tina is right that none of this is new to the people doing it.
That is the part worth arguing about.
Work that has no name, no evidence trail, and no line in a budget is invisible to everyone who plans and funds health systems.
It also stops the day the people doing it for free can no longer afford to.
Why what these workers know belongs in the evidence, not in the anecdotes.
The Geneva Learning Foundation gathered these experiences over three years and gave them back to the people who shared them.