The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) is launching its second decade of inventing new ways to support local leadership for change. As we celebrate our tenth year, Alumni are organizing their own events to take stock and map what comes next. This report documents what we learned in Lomé, Togo, when TGLF Alumni came together for an impromptu meeting at the Ministry of Health.
Lomé, 19 June 2026 (The Geneva Learning Foundation) – The meeting was not supposed to last two hours. Palenfo Gnourfateon, a field representative of The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF), had arrived in Lomé for other work, a visit tied to a measles survey campaign, and had decided at short notice to gather whatever Scholars – Alumni of TGLF’s programmes since 2026 – he could reach.
The national director of immunization had agreed, the previous day, to lend a room.
By the time Palenfo opened his presentation slides, there were people in chairs around him in Lomé and faces on a screen joining from across Togo: the WHO office, the Ministry of Health’s planning directorate, a regional health office in Dapaon in the far north, and the coordination office of a 39-organisation civil society platform that is the country’s primary Gavi-funded community vaccination actor.
Reda Sadki, TGLF’s founder, had intended only to open the Zoom room and say a brief hello.
He stayed for the full 119 minutes.
The session was, in form, a programme briefing.
In substance, it was a reckoning with what a decade of peer learning can mean for the professionals who lived it.
The numbers and what they leave out
TGLF is turning ten in 2026.
The statistics that Palenfo presented to frame the reunion carry weight.
More than 80,000 health professionals are now connected across the Foundation’s Scholar network.
At least 137 countries have one Scholar or more.
Seventy percent of the network is based in West and Central Africa.
Togo alone has 791 registered scholars, spread from the national level to district health facilities.
The new ambassador programme, launched to mark the tenth anniversary, has designated 267 ambassadors across 24 countries.
These are not trivial numbers for a programme that asks nothing of its participants except their time, their willingness to share what they know, and the commitment to take action.
Entry to every TGLF programme is open access.
If you are willing to make the effort to learn, and then use that learning to take action, you will receive a warm welcome from Alumni like those who met in Lomé.
The Foundation’s central wager is that the accumulated knowledge of health workers in the field is itself a resource that formal training systems fail to mobilise.
Four trajectories, one argument
Across four different accounts, a cumulative argument took shape about professional development in places where formal postgraduate pathways are scarce, slow, or unavailable.
Manzama-Esso KOLA arrived at vaccination through sociology.
He now coordinates the Togo civil society platform for vaccination and immunisation, a network of 39 organisations that receives Gavi funding and works alongside the national immunisation programme.
His entry point into the TGLF world was a course on data triangulation, in collaboration with World Health Organization, in 2019.
“After training with the Foundation,” he said, “I understood that data triangulation must be done every day, in everything we do. Because it lets you see the effectiveness of everything you do on the ground.”
He produced a small manual and trained the monitoring and evaluation officers of his member organisations.
The quality of their data improved and the inconsistencies in the reports they received fell.
When his platform prepares Gavi funding proposals, he now draws on Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030), the global strategy he learned to turn into plans and activities with TGLF.
That means he knows what Gavi is looking for.
“Today,” he said, “we are a well-recognised and well-consulted actor in vaccination.”
The Division de l’immunisation, he added, could confirm it.
Winiga KOUDEMA is a paediatric clinician.
He was nominated district health director and then hospital director without any formal epidemiology training.
A colleague shared a link to TGLF’s COVID-19 Peer Hub, when continuity of services was the dominant concern.
The courses led him to restructure his health team’s approach to vaccination organisation, logistics, and cold chain management, domains outside his medical training.
They also led him to pursue a postgraduate diploma in epidemiology.
That diploma, combined with the Scholar certifications he listed on his CV, led to a consultant position in polio and vaccination with the WHO.
Sustained engagement deepened his competence until he became permanent WHO staff, first overseeing malaria and neglected tropical diseases, then, after an organisational restructuring, taking charge of maternal and child health, reproductive health, and the full span of health across the life course.
He came to the reunion, he said, to re-engage after a period when new professional responsibilities had pulled him away.
“I think that with this meeting,” he said, “this is an opportunity for me to truly re-launch myself.”
Yamdi Kanou was there from the beginning.
He joined in 2019, became the country team lead for Togo, and spent a year trying to build the Scholar network at national level, including a visit to the Division de l’immunisation with the director to make the team’s existence known.
He described that effort with honesty.
The network was being built from health facility level upward, while coordination happened from the central level downward, and the two did not meet easily.
“There were difficulties,” he said.
“They were somewhat difficult for us.” He later enrolled in a one-year field epidemiology training programme, which disconnected him from the Scholar community for a period.
He applied for certain TGLF programmes and was not selected. “That discouraged me somewhat. But I did not give up.” What the programme gave him was a set of communication strategies for the field. “I find it easy now to communicate. I can convince parents who still resist today, to have their children vaccinated. I find myself quite at ease in the exercise of my profession.”
Kanma Nanah Tena is the colleague you would turn to if you wanted to understand how peer learning becomes institutional change.
She has been a Scholar for seven years.
She worked on the immunisation equity analysis project and used what she learned to develop strategies for reaching zero-dose children and populations with difficult physical access.
She applied the plan of action analysis grids from the TGLF programmes to her own team’s planning work.
She shared every relevant learning through the national PEV focal point WhatsApp group.
She tried to become an ambassador and, like KOLA, could not complete the four-week activation.
She identified the 25-versus-791 gap and named it as an actionable problem.
She ended with a commitment: the country network would be reactivated, the WhatsApp group would grow, and the Division would be properly briefed.
At the close of the meeting, she turned on her camera for a group photograph.
What the constraints are called
Partway through the presentation on the new malaria programme, Palenfo used a phrase that deserved more attention than it received in the moment.
He was explaining how the TGLF approach handles the conditions of the field: poor roads in the rainy season, limited connectivity, overstretched staff.
“The constraints of the field are intimately linked to our reality,” he said.
“That is why we call them constraints and not weaknesses.”
The distinction is a design principle.
A programme that treats field conditions as weaknesses designs for the ideal and fails in the real.
A programme that treats them as constraints designs for what is there.
KOLA ran data triangulation training with a manual and no budget.
KOUDEMA reorganised a hospital team’s vaccination logistics from a position with no epidemiological credentials.
Kanou addressed vaccine hesitancy with communication strategies rather than authoritative instructions.
Tena analysed plans of action with a grid rather than an external evaluation firm.
These are not stories of health workers making do.
They are stories of health workers exercising judgment, using what they have learned, in the conditions that exist.
Palenfo cited an efficiency claim of seven times faster implementation at ten times lower cost, offered without a methodology.
The testimonials offer something more durable.
They show how peer learning produces faster, cheaper, more contextually rooted action.
The learning is already inside the system, inside the people who make it run.
The activation gap and what it asks
The 97% of Togo’s registered scholars who are not in the active country group are not absent from the work.
They complete certifications.
They attend Teach to Reach sessions.
They share links with colleagues.
Some list the Scholar role on their CVs.
What they do not do is operate as a visible, mutually reinforcing country network with institutional recognition and a collective identity.
This is the gap that the second decade has to close.
Reda Sadki described the coming phase in terms of a new competency framework for health leadership, to be presented at the 2 July Teach to Reach session.
The framework draws on the 2023 Global Health Manifesto produced with 1,300 health actors, and it maps each person’s position in a matrix of professional development.
The shift he described moves from “I am a scholar” to “we are a network that acts,” from individual certification to collective capacity.
Frameworks alone will not make that shift.
It will be made in rooms like the Division de l’immunisation in Lomé on 19 June 2026, where four people with long histories in the programme sat together and said aloud what the programme had meant to them, what it had made possible, and what still needed to be done.
It will be made when Tena briefs the director of the Division at the start of the following week, as she committed to do.
It will be made when Kanou’s WhatsApp group grows from 25 toward 791.
It will be made when Dr Eric Kinho Koffi Gnassounou-Akpa, who attended the meeting as a guest and said he had come to understand what the Scholar concept meant, completes his first certification and signs his own name to the network.
“Once a scholar,” Palenfo said, as the session closed, “always a scholar.”
The line sounds like sentiment.
In Lomé, on 19 June 2026, it sounded like infrastructure.