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The Geneva Learning Foundation runs Teach to Reach, a peer learning platform for people who work for health, and its monthly live sessions usually follow a published programme. In June 2026 the Foundation tore that programme up. As Bundibugyo virus disease spread across parts of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the facilitators set aside the climate report they had planned to launch and gave the hour to health workers on both sides of the affected border. By the end of the hour they had opened a course co-created with scholars in the two countries.
A city council health worker in northern Uganda ran case management and surveillance through an earlier Ebola outbreak. He names the place the virus spread fastest, and it is not the ward. It is the burial. Then he speaks straight to colleagues in the district fighting it now: we have fought this many times and beaten it, so you can beat it too.
What you are watching
Colleagues who have survived earlier outbreaks tell colleagues in the current one what they learned. Colleagues in countries with no cases ask the questions they will need answered if cases arrive. Then the Foundation asks the room what belongs in a course about this outbreak, and opens registration while people are still typing.
Who speaks
A city council health worker in northern Uganda who worked an earlier Ebola response, a public health officer in Kampala supporting district teams, a lecturer in medical physiology in south-eastern Nigeria who rebuilt her teaching after a climate and health course, and colleagues joining from districts on both sides of the border. One speaker loses connectivity mid-answer, and the facilitators name the problem on air rather than pretend it away.
What happens
- Three prompts drive the hour: one challenge you faced, one lesson from a past outbreak, one question for someone across the border.
- A responder lists what actually stops an outbreak: disciplined infection prevention, a task force that meets, contact tracing followed to the last name, and burials handled by the burial team instead of the family.
- The Foundation announces the course, credits the Ugandan and Congolese scholars who shaped it, and holds the start date until enough colleagues have registered to make peer learning work.
- A facilitator demonstrates how to push a correct source into your network in three clicks, and finishes in under a minute.
- An alumna explains how she now teaches thermoregulation by starting outside the body, and what made her abandon a belief she had taught for years.
Reasons to watch
- A responder says fear, not the virus, is what stops teams from working, then describes what overriding fear looks like at a bedside. No protocol document contains that page.
- A public health officer asks how frontline workers protect themselves when no vaccine for this species is available to them, and the answers stay practical instead of reassuring.
- The lecturer admits she used to believe that giving people health information changes behaviour, and explains what convinced her otherwise. If you run health education, you may hear your own assumption said out loud.
- The Foundation builds the course from what the room asks for, so registering early actually changes what the course contains.
- A colleague from a country with no cases asks about the shape of the rumours and the clinical signs that do not look like other outbreaks. That is the question preparedness plans usually miss.
- The facilitators say this is not a session where experts tell you what to think, then explain how to judge whether the account of a peer deserves your trust.
Resources and access
The Foundation covers the cost of participation, so these courses carry no fee.
- Share experience: Bundibugyo virus outbreak response in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
- A rapid gender analysis of what was known about this outbreak, for anyone writing a response plan.
- Malaria: Turning the tide, learn from real world health worker experience.
- Learning together to lead change on the frontline of climate change and health.
- Supporting people living with noncommunicable diseases in humanitarian settings.
- The Foundation newsletter that followed this session.
Leave one comment with the single lesson you would want a colleague across a border to know. Share this with someone working in a district that has no cases yet, because preparing costs less than responding.