At Teach to Reach 15 on 2 July 2026, The Geneva Learning Foundation gave back three years of collective learning about climate change and health to the people who had produced it. More than 1,000 health workers from over 60 countries had described how the climate crisis was reaching their communities and what they were doing about it. TGLF’s Charlotte Mbuh read ten of their accounts aloud, one at a time, and then the room answered two questions: how do you know that climate is hurting your community, and if you had unlimited resources, what would you do about it? This is the second article in a series of six from that convening, and it is the one that steps back from analysis. What follows is the session itself, told through the voices in it. The next Teach to Reach, number 16, takes place on 6 August 2026.
Lillian Mutua went first.
She coordinates health promotion for Nairobi City County, and she did not reach for the word “climate” before she reached for the count.
“We had a lot of fatalities where we lost more than 100 people in the central business district. Shelters were flooded. The people who live along the riverbank, their houses were swept away. The schools were flooded. Health institutions also were flooded. We lost a lot of hard copies of registers and cards. And the household people who have chronic diseases, who attend clinics, they could not salvage their medicine and their cards.”
Lillian Mutua, head of health promotion, Nairobi City County, Kenya.
Ask a hydrologist about a flood and you get a river.
Ask Mutua and you get lost patient records, spoiled medicines, and mixing of sewage into drinking water.
Then came the no-limits plan, which was not a plea for rescue.
“I would engage the communities to allow them to identify the risks. Help them map out their hotspots. Map the locally available resources. Have some of the decision makers, influencers, and leadership create working committees. And help them prioritise, in case there is an event, how do they get information, where can they get shelter, how do they salvage life so that we do not lose more lives.”
Lillian Mutua, Kenya.
From Nairobi the session went to Kathmandu, where Deepanjali Shrestha has watched a disease change its address.
“Because of the climate change, we are having more dengue fever in our place. Before it used to be in the hill region, but now it is in the central region also.”
Deepanjali Shrestha, retired health worker, Nepal.
In Riyadh, Kaiser Parvez treats what a 50-degree afternoon does to a body, and he had already stopped waiting.
“We have seen the real-time cases, dehydration, severe sunstroke, a lot of cases we have seen, and we treated them. I started planting voluntarily from my own pocket. I collected my nurses, doctors, my colleagues, and we started planting trees so it will cool the environment.”
Dr Kaiser Parvez, Ministry of Health, Saudi Arabia.
Then Charlotte Mbuh read the ten local solutions, each one a sentence a health worker had written down.
A youth crew in Cameroon had turned a flooded bridge into a ferry, carrying people across on their shoulders for a hundred francs.
A community in Kavumu had bought a plot and built its own health centre.
A doctor in Senegal had handed out phones so labouring women cut off by washed-out tracks could still reach a midwife.
Two accounts landed hardest in the room.
“We organised mobile health clinics using boats to reach stranded communities. These boats were borrowed from local fishermen who generously offered their assistance. We prioritised essential services such as immunisations, antenatal care, and treatment for common illnesses like malaria and diarrhoea.”
Habila Kushana Habu, community health worker, Taraba State, Nigeria.
“The floods blocked and destroyed the existing tracks. The women all missed their appointments. We provided telephones to facilitate contact between women in labour and the midwives, who were able to give useful advice while waiting to receive them at the health centre.”
Malick Ndome, project manager, Kolda, Senegal.
When Reda Sadki asked what surprised people about the ten solutions, Tina Iroghama Agbonyinma refused the premise, and her refusal was the point.
“They are not quite surprising, because this is part of our daily work as field workers. Local solutions are the first step that every health worker provides to secure the health of the community, before the state and national teams come in.”
Betty Koech, a researcher at the Kenya Medical Research Institute, named what a scientist notices in the accounts that a scientist would not have predicted.
“What surprises me is the level of flexibility that exists within the structures, the ability to change very fast and adapt. What I am taking away is the ability to work with the communities and solve problems.”
Catalina Croitoru teaches climate and health at a university in Moldova.
She said the science was not what moved her.
“What impressed me most was hearing the real-life experiences shared by health professionals from different countries. Although they work in very different settings, they face many of the same challenges. Scientific papers provide data and statistics, but today we heard the human side.”
Chigozie Anyasor, a radiographer working in Nigeria, put the takeaway in the plainest terms anyone managed all afternoon.
“The efforts needed to solve these problems are not far-fetched. All we need to do is really think outside the box, and we will always find solutions.”
Lul Omar Ulusow closed the circle.
She manages maternal and reproductive health at the regional level in Somalia, and she had come to listen.
She left with a plan, and with a sentence that carried the whole afternoon inside it.
“I take lessons from this and I will apply them in my community, because always, always I face a flood. Also sometimes I face the roadblocks. And as I am working in maternal health, this impressed me.”
Lul Omar Ulusow, maternal and reproductive health manager, Somalia.
The word that runs through every one of these accounts is not “help.”
It is “we.”
We organised.
We built.
We provided.
We switched to daily.
Reda Sadki named the report’s most uncomfortable finding while the slides moved: the cost of all this “we” is being paid out of the pockets of the people saying it, government staff included.
The midwife in Tarime hires the motorbikes herself.
Somebody in Ho West spends four days on the road between communities and eats the cost.
The knowledge is already there, and so is the bill.
What the session left open is who else will help carry it.