KINSHASA and BUKAVU, Saturday, June 13, 2026. Fifty-five Congolese health workers and managers meet by video for two hours. They spent three weeks preparing. They chose the topic themselves: the Ebola outbreak spreading in the east since last month. It is the Bundibugyo strain. No one ordered them to meet. No one paid them. The virtual room is run by Ambassadors of The Geneva Learning Foundation.
They call themselves the “Scholars.” They know each other. They have learned together on the Foundation’s platform since 2019. They never stopped, not during the pandemic and not during earlier outbreaks.
This article tells what was said that Saturday.
But it asks a simpler question.
What is the value of a network of health workers who volunteer, who are already inside the communities they serve, and who have trained month after month to learn from each other? What is this worth in an outbreak with no vaccine and no approved treatment?
A structured meeting, run by health managers
The outbreak has been spreading since May in Ituri province.
As of June 11, 2026, Ebola treatment centers were 69.7 percent full. This is from the official bulletin published June 12.
Of 419 alerts reported, 90 percent were investigated.
Joseph Baroani Kikuni Jobacky presents these numbers during the meeting. He is an expert at the Ministry of Public Health, Hygiene and Prevention. He is also chief inspector of the Health Inspectorate.
In the room, they call him Papa Joseph.
The meeting agenda is public. They followed it.
An opening by the two coordinating Ambassadors, Patrice Bamulenga and Dr. Noelly Watusadisi.
A forty-minute presentation on risk communication and community engagement by Dr. Dominique Aleko.
A thirty-minute presentation on the outbreak and lessons from twelve past epidemics by Joseph Baroani Kikuni Jobacky.
A ten-minute report from the field in Durba, Ituri, by Pasiko Eza. He is the focal point for a health zone fourteen kilometers from the epicenter.
A message from Charlotte Mbuh, director of programs at the Foundation. She announces a new course on Bundibugyo virus disease. Scholars from Uganda and the DRC helped design it.
A question and answer session. Stanis Mutamba wrote three questions to guide it. He is chief physician of a hospital center that organized the event.
A closing that names the organizing team. It passes the work to ongoing conversations on WhatsApp and weekly video meetings.
This was not a free discussion.
It was a technical meeting. Congolese health managers designed it, prepared it, and ran it using their own tools.
What is a Scholar
The Ambassadors at this meeting were not just anyone available.
By the end of 2025, The Geneva Learning Foundation had named 314 Ambassadors. 167 of them live in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
To become an Ambassador, you must finish at least one certified program from the Foundation. You must also complete a four-week activation cycle. The Foundation certifies what you contribute, not just that you showed up.
The network has its own memory and rhythm.
Since July 2019, Congolese Scholars meet every Saturday at 5 p.m. on Zoom. They share news from one health zone to another. Later, the conversation spread to WhatsApp and video calls. It never stopped. Not during the pandemic. Not during earlier Ebola outbreaks. Not between outbreaks.
The June 13 meeting was not unusual.
It was what happens when a habit meets an urgent moment.
The voices in that meeting carry specific titles.
Joseph Baroani Kikuni Jobacky, deputy inspector general at the ministry.
Dominique Aleko, risk communication trainer working in Kinshasa.
Marlène Kapinga Mulumba, chief of service at the national office of continuing education.
Évariste Kayembe, specialist in gender-based violence at the program management unit for health system development. He went to Bunia and Wampara two weeks after the outbreak was officially declared.
Pasiko Eza, health zone focal point on assignment in Durba, Ituri.
Toyi Mirefu, Ambassador based in Bukavu. He works with universities and communities in South Kivu.
Patrice Bamulenga. He was the first to speak at Kitambo on May 9, 2026. That morning, Congolese Scholars celebrated ten years of peer learning and launched their shared program on malaria.
None of them represents just one employer.
All of them have an employer.
And all of them are working this Saturday outside their job description.
The province that has not woken up
The meeting opens with South Kivu.
Toyi Mirefu, calling from Bukavu, describes two provinces facing different epidemics.
“People do not know. They fall into stereotypes and prejudices about certain beliefs about disease.”
He continues.
“We have not recorded many cases yet in our zone. People are not awake like they are in Ituri province. In Ituri, in Bunia, in North Kivu, people already understand and are starting to learn well. Even at school. I was talking with my sister in Bunia. She said her granddaughter came home from preschool with prevention steps she learned in class.”
A family in Bunia. A preschool. A little girl coming home from school with something she learned in class.
The image says what policy documents cannot.
Prevention education takes root where risk has arrived.
Where it has not, rumor fills the space.
The presentation, grief, and the sentence that explains everything else
At 1 p.m., Patrice Bamulenga shares news with the room.
The main speaker, Dr. Dominique Aleko, is about to give a talk on risk communication. She just learned that someone in her family died.
“She said she must be here. But right now, she is going through a hard time. On behalf of the DRC Scholars, we stand with you, dear Madame Marie-Dominique.”
Messages arrive in the chat.
Jérémie Mpata Lumpungu, from Tshikapa: “My condolences, dear Marie Dominique. We are with you.”
Marlène Kapinga Mulumba: “My sincere condolences to Madame Marie Dominique and peace to the departed soul.”
Dominique Aleko replies in the chat without stopping her talk: “Thank you all. Your compassion touches our hearts.”
She speaks for forty minutes. She shows no sign of her grief.
Her main point is one sentence. She says it right at the start.
“If someone does not understand the risk, they will not act. Everything you put in place will miss them. They will not act because it does not touch them.”
Everything else comes from that.
Trust comes before action.
Rumors grow when you repeat them.
“Do not fight a rumor by saying it out loud. Do not say, look what people are saying, and then talk about it more. No. When you do that, you help the rumor spread. Answer with action. Give good information.”
And you must start with what people already know and do.
“We must know what the community believes, what their cultures are, what they do. We must know these things to help them, the way TGLF taught us.”
A practitioner in grief delivers this from Kinshasa. Her colleagues work in the Hema and Nyakunde chiefdoms. This sentence states the agreement behind a response that works.
Twelve outbreaks in one career
Joseph Baroani Kikuni Jobacky speaks next.
He starts with what he knows.
“This is our twelfth outbreak since 2014. That year we started fighting the epidemic in West Africa. We went there to help.”
Then he names what the DRC has lived through.
“The DRC has faced 17 outbreaks in fifty years. They started in 1976. This virus is the Bundibugyo strain. This is the second time we have seen it. The first was in 2012.”
This is a man who has seen many treatment centers.
This is also a leader stating a fact.
“Even in West Africa, we had no cure. We gave supportive care. We followed every protocol carefully. Infection prevention. Patient care. Safe and dignified burial.”
Without a cure, following the protocol is what kept things together.
In the east, Joseph Baroani Kikuni Jobacky adds something the manuals put somewhere else.
“This is the reality of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. When this disease appears in a conflict zone in the east, we add a security pillar. You cannot go supervise unless security forces say you can.”
An Ebola response in Ituri is not the same as an Ebola response in a peaceful zone.
It is an Ebola response plus a security pillar. Security decides who moves, when, and with what protection.
The numbers come next.
“We received 419 alerts. We checked 90 percent of them. That is good. We should build on that.”
“As of June 11, published June 12, our Ebola treatment centers are at 69.7 percent full.”
The voice fourteen kilometers from the outbreak
Pasiko Eza speaks next.
He does not talk about Kinshasa.
He talks about Durba, in Ituri, fourteen kilometers from the central office of the Watsa health zone. Watsa sits next to the Mungwalu health zone, which he says is “hit especially hard.”
“The day the outbreak was declared in Ituri province last month, fear spread through our whole population. We acted right away. Political leaders, government staff, religious leaders, health workers, and community liaisons all stepped up awareness campaigns on local radio.”
He describes what his team tried.
“With friends from Kinshasa, we built a Kobo Collect app to see how people felt about the outbreak. We went into the field and collected data.”
No institution asked Pasiko Eza to run this survey.
He built it with “friends from Kinshasa,” other Scholars, using a mobile app that public health teams use for household surveys.
The results were not good.
“The data showed a big problem. Most local people still do not believe Ebola virus disease is real.”
Doubt stayed strong fourteen kilometers from the outbreak, after a month of work, after radio campaigns.
This is exactly the kind of information a surveillance system does not catch. A Scholar with a phone can get it in days.
Burial and the Red Cross
Marlène Kapinga Mulumba, head of service at the national office for continuing education, speaks next, after Dominique Aleko presents.
She brings up a case everyone in the room knows.
“Two days ago, we heard that people attacked Red Cross workers. Why? We know our African cultures and traditions. When someone dies, you stand with your family. But with Ebola virus disease, especially the Bundibugyo strain, you cannot stand with them.”
She states what happens next.
“That is why people are afraid. They say we are lying. People try to take the body. That spreads more cases.”
She then shares something she marks clearly as not official.
“Yesterday, a friend at the provincial health office in the east told me they received—this is not official—fifty deaths.”
Then she makes one practical suggestion.
“If families need to be present, give them protective gear.”
This is one of the most useful sentences of the afternoon.
She sees that grief is real and right.
She knows the strain is dangerous.
She suggests, calmly, that we invest in protective gear so families can be present without spreading infection.
No one in the room disagrees.
The lab that could not see this strain
Dr. Évariste Kayembe speaks last.
He was there, he says.
“I went to Bunia myself two weeks after they declared the epidemic. I made it all the way to Wampara. We were there to help coordinate the response across different areas.”
Then he shares something that shows the gap between what we have and what we need on the ground.
“We had trouble detecting and diagnosing the disease. Our group had helped rebuild the main lab in Bunia with World Bank money. But the machine we had for testing was a PCR. This strain of the virus did not show up on that machine. We needed different cartridges, a device called RADI-1. That is why the first positive tests came from the INRB lab in Kinshasa.”
A lab that had just been rebuilt, in the right place, with a PCR machine, could not see the virus spreading just a few miles away.
The first diagnoses had to go all the way to Kinshasa.
“Our project helped the lab get stronger so they could test people right there, with mobile labs, especially in Mungwalu.”
He ends with a line that matches what Dominique Aleko said.
“We went to meet the customary authority ourselves, the chief of the Hema chiefdom. That area includes the Wampara health zone and the Nyakundes, who were hit very hard by this epidemic. You cannot do this work without working with the local community.”
Meeting the customary chief before you start tracking contacts is not a choice.
It is part of the protocol in that area.
What informed volunteers bring that outside teams do not
Here in the story, we should stop and ask a question the session never asks but that sits behind everything people say.
Why are these people here on a Saturday afternoon with no contract and no pay, showing slides they made on their own time, reporting that Red Cross workers are being attacked, asking a colleague fourteen kilometers from the outbreak to run a survey?
Research from the past twenty years on Ebola responses in West Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo gives a clear answer.
After the 2014 and 2015 response in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia, researchers found that community health workers stayed active in their communities and kept helping people, often in the first days of the outbreak “without formal direction or pay”. The long relationship between these workers and their communities turned out to be “ much stronger than the relationship between communities and health workers at facilities”. A quick review published in BMJ Global Health in 2020 reaches a working conclusion: community workers need clear roles during a pandemic, but what makes them effective is that the relationship already exists. You cannot build it during the emergency.
The opposite happened in eastern Congo.
The 2018 to 2020 outbreak in North Kivu and Ituri, which Congolese Scholars still remember, saw huge technical work run into a trust problem. A study published in PLOS ONE in 2019 reports that 77 percent of people said the outbreak would keep going as long as local communities were left out. Local health workers were ready to help at first, but felt “undervalued and pushed aside” by a response they saw as foreign. The gap in pay between local workers and national or international workers made people suspicious. Once trust was lost, it cost more to rebuild than the response had saved.
This research lines up with a study published in 2024 in BMC Health Services Research that states a simple rule. Programs that hire and support community health workers when things are calm create the conditions for a fast response when crisis hits. Money spent in quiet times pays off in the hard weeks.
Informed volunteering is not, in this case, a lack of professional commitment.
It is the most practical form of it.
It works outside the per diem system, so it avoids the suspicion that comes with unequal pay.
It rests on relationships built slowly over time, so it starts with trust that outside teams have to earn while the crisis is happening.
It survives funding cuts, because it does not depend on funding.
And it starts in hours, because the network already exists. When urgency comes, it only has to turn on what is already there.
What this network does that other models do not
Three things, already visible on June 13, are worth naming.
First, sideways flow of information that skips the chain of command.
Pasiko Eza did not write a report for his boss, who would have sent it to the coordination team, who would have summarized it for partners.
He shared directly, in front of his peers and the program director of an independent Foundation, what people were saying on the ground. He pointed out the gap it showed.
The information traveled in two hours. Fifty-five people heard it at the same time.
Second, experience moves between places facing the same problems.
Joseph Baroani Kikuni Jobacky is not telling a generic Ebola story.
He is telling the story of twelve epidemics, including the 2014 outbreak in West Africa. He pulls out the piece that textbooks put somewhere else: safety, when the area is in conflict. That matters to Évariste Kayembe, who worked in Wampara. That matters to Marlène Kapinga Mulumba, whose contact at the eastern provincial health office is reporting numbers that no bulletin has published. That matters to Toyi Mirefu, who is watching panic rise in Bukavu even though no cases have been reported.
A solution built in one place reaches, within days, the places facing the same conditions.
Third, cultural work that is not handed off to outsiders.
Évariste Kayembe met with the Hema chiefdom leader.
Marlène Kapinga Mulumba suggests giving bereaved families what they need to hold their ceremony, rather than banning it.
Dominique Aleko names the rumor without spreading it.
None of these steps were ordered by an outside partner.
All of them match the World Health Organization’s technical guidance.
All were decided, in practice, by people who know what their community can hear and what it cannot.
That is, for all practical purposes, the working definition researchers have used for ten years to describe effective community engagement.
The Foundation’s voice, from Ébolowa
Charlotte Mbuh speaks at around 2:45 p.m.
She is calling in from Cameroon, just as she did on May 9, when she listened to the Scholars in Kitambo for more than three hours before speaking.
She starts with solidarity.
“On behalf of The Geneva Learning Foundation, our hearts are with you. We value the work you are doing, and we pray that we can respond and stop the spread of this virus very quickly.”
Then she says what the Foundation adds to what the Scholars are building.
“Beyond our malaria program, the course we launched, reversing the malaria trend, we have also thought about what we can offer to support the response to this epidemic in the DRC. It is training on this disease, Ebola virus disease.”
The link is shared live in the chat.
Bundibugyo virus disease: learn, act, and get certified
Share your experience and learn from your peers about Bundibugyo virus disease. Learn more and join this certification from The Geneva Learning Foundation: HH-FR-01 Experience sharing: Bundibugyo virus disease in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo
The course was built with Scholars from Uganda and the DRC. It starts only when enough peers have signed up. The Geneva Learning Foundation used this same approach with the COVID-19 Peer Hub in 2020 and 2021. More than 6,000 health workers shared 1,200 ideas for managing the pandemic in ten days. By mapping those action plans, Cambridge researchers were able to track how learning moved across countries, organizations, and levels of the health system.
This model is similar to Project ECHO COVID-19 Clinical Rounds. That project ran from 2020 to 2021 with the U.S. Department of Health. It reached clinicians in fifty states and more than one hundred countries, delivering over 58,000 hours of learning. The authors say peer learning is “probably critical for future health emergencies where information is everywhere but evidence is rare.”
What the Foundation is offering this Saturday, June 13, is not training sent from outside. It is not a team of experts flown in.
It is turning on, for the Bundibugyo strain, the network that has been learning together for ten years.
What stays open at the end
At 3:25 p.m., Patrice Bamulenga opens the floor one last time for questions.
In the chat, Oger Mulange has posted a question.
“For Ms. Dominique, what is being done right now in the field to fight misinformation, especially with social media? For Mr. Pasiko, where are we with getting enough infection prevention and control supplies?”
The question about supplies does not get answered during the session.
The question about misinformation stays open.
Trésor Ntumba Kalonji, calling in from Mbujimayi, has another question.
“A question for Papa Joseph. Can a person who is in the incubation period infect others?”
That question does not get answered either. There is not enough time.
These questions do not disappear.
They go into the ongoing conversation that has been happening since July 2019 in WhatsApp groups and weekly Zoom calls.
Patrice Bamulenga closes by naming the team that organized the session. He does not pretend it was just him.
“Besides me, there is Papa Joseph, who coordinated the response to the Ebola virus outbreak. He was supported by Dr. Noelly, who was his deputy. He worked with a communications team led by Ms. Marlène and my colleague Jean-Paul, who is not with us. He is in the field. And to the other colleagues, especially Dr. Stanis, Dr. Emmanuel, and everyone who took part.”
It is a list of work that was not paid for.
What is in this virtual room for anyone looking to help
The session does not ask for anything.
It does not beg for money. It does not apply for grants. It does not wait for committees to approve it.
It just happens.
But what it shows in two hours is exactly what a partner who wants to help fight Bundibugyo virus disease would have trouble finding any other way.
A network of leaders and health workers already inside the communities they serve. Those communities trust them because they have been there for years.
The ability to bring that network together in days, on a topic they choose, in the language they speak, with presentations they prepare.
An organized way of working that creates a professional session without a special budget. It has an agenda, presentations, field reports, written questions, and answers.
People from different jobs and levels working together. A ministry inspector, a university expert on violence against women, a training department head, a health zone contact person, and a provincial ambassador all talk about the same topic at the same time.
And a memory that does not disappear when projects end. The Scholars carry it. They have met every Saturday since July 2019. They plan to keep meeting.
This does not replace tracking diseases, sending teams to the field, or listening to communities in formal ways.
It adds to all of those. It does what none of them can do alone.
Malaria: learn, take action, and earn certification
Share your experience and learn from your colleagues about malaria. Learn more and enroll in this certification from The Geneva Learning Foundation: MALARIA-FR-01 Malaria: reverse the trend: learning from frontline workers’ experience
In Bukavu, Mbujimayi, Tshikapa, Durba, Kinshasa, Kananga, Ébolowa, and Geneva, the conversation continues.
Every Saturday at 5 p.m. on Zoom.
Further reading
- The Geneva Learning Foundation’s course on Bundibugyo virus disease: go.learning.foundation/c/32222.
- The “Reverse the malaria trend” program: go.learning.foundation/tglf/c/31996.
- The report “Malaria in Africa: reverse the trend,” Teach to Reach 11: DOI 10.5281/zenodo.18067469.
- The May 9, 2026 session in Kitambo, tenth anniversary and launch of the malaria program: Malaria in Kinshasa, a national network launches the reverse-the-trend program and celebrates 10 years.
- The Congolese cell and the weekly Saturday meeting: We are the ones who are there every day.
- The remarkable story of the Ambassadors: Scholar one day, Scholar always.
References
- Miller NP, Milsom P, Johnson G, Bedford J, Kapeu AS, Diallo AO, et al. Community health workers during the Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. J Glob Health. 2018;8(2):020601.
- Bhaumik S, Moola S, Tyagi J, Nambiar D, Kakoti M. Community health workers for pandemic response: a rapid evidence synthesis. BMJ Glob Health. 2020;5(6):e002769.
- Vinck P, Pham PN, Bindu KK, Bedford J, Nilles EJ. Institutional trust and misinformation in the response to the 2018–19 Ebola outbreak in North Kivu, DR Congo: a population-based survey. PLoS One. 2019;14(9):e0223104.
- Smith T, Mughal F, Sansone V, Banks J, Maden M, McManus E, et al. Community health workers’ dissemination of COVID-19 information and services in low- and middle-income countries: a scoping review. BMC Health Serv Res. 2024;24:663.
- Lewis R, Lamb J, Hilty D, Kjellin H, Smith P, Ange B, et al. Facilitating real-time, multidirectional learning for clinicians in a low-evidence pandemic response: Project ECHO COVID-19 Clinical Rounds. Disaster Med Public Health Prep. 2023;17:e347.
- The Geneva Learning Foundation. Malaria in Africa: turning the tide. Teach to Reach 11, Listen and Learn report no. 19, French edition. Geneva: The Geneva Learning Foundation; 2026.
- Sadki R. Malaria in Kinshasa: a national network launches the “Turning the tide” program and celebrates 10 years. 2026 May 11.
- Sadki R. Scholar one day, Scholar always: inside the last-mile global health network that runs on trust. 2026 Mar 12.
- Sadki R. We are the ones who are there every day: how a global network of health workers is closing the last-mile gap. 2026 Feb 25.
- The Geneva Learning Foundation. The COVID-19 Peer Hub as an example of collective intelligence in practice. 2023 Sep 7.