The Geneva Learning Foundation

About The Geneva Learning Foundation

The Geneva Learning Foundation is a Swiss non-profit that explores research, development, and educational opportunities to solve critical threats to our societies. It believes that the next phase of digital transformation will be through hybrid networks: fusing the digital and the physical. Its programs span a range of disciplines but share a single driving force: to connect and empower thousands of frontline practitioners through shared ideas, peer exercises, and accelerator projects.

The ability to share ideas and best practices in the workplace is often limited to co-worker conversations or top-down organizational structures. The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) advocates for and creates networks between individuals and groups to help them lead change. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the Foundation’s existing human knowledge network connecting health professionals working in routine vaccination services and healthcare provided part of the infrastructure to build the COVID-19 Peer Hub.

In 2020, this platform became the world’s largest platform of immunization professionals from health facilities, districts, and national teams to share ideas and support each other: first to support recovery of routine immunization, then to roll out COVID-19 vaccines.

Why create the COVID-19 Peer Hub?

• The pandemic’s impact on healthcare
  • COVID-19 caused disruption to vaccination services all over the world. WHO estimated that this disruption resulted in over 80 million children under the age of 1 being left vulnerable to vaccine-preventable diseases.
• An urgent need to share ideas and practices in the face of the unknown
  • The Foundation had been tracking interventions around vaccine delivery since July 2019, particularly around: vaccinating zero dose children and migrant populations; the creation of a Missed Opportunities in Vaccination system to ensure eligible children aren’t overlooked; improving geographic vaccine equity; increasing frequency of services in urban areas with a higher patient volume; and utilizing community engagement techniques.
• Opportunity afforded by the Wazoku platform
  • The idea management platform donated by Wazoku provided built-in sharing, rating, and collaboration – helping staff connect across levels of the health system and between countries.

Features of the Platform

Users of the COVID-19 Peer Hub access the Ideas Engine powered by Wazoku, undertake Peer Learning Exercises, and join the Impact Accelerator to translate shared ideas into concrete actions. Being able to view and vote on ideas from healthcare staff in other countries meant that practices can be crowdsourced – so what worked in one place could be adapted to work elsewhere.

Peer Learning Exercises undertaken on the Peer Hub focus on actionable and relevant recommendations, to ensure that solutions can be translated from the Hub into reality. Participants were encouraged to produce proposals that would strengthen ongoing work and review one another’s’ plans.

The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) ensured each proposal underwent peer review and received constructive comments, forming part of a feedback network of like-minded leaders working towards the same goal. The Impact Accelerator kickstarted the execution of the plans developed in the Peer Learning Exercises. This process was introduced to give participant ideas the best possible launchpad for actionable results.

The solution: using the platform to bring tangible improvements to vaccine services

Map of Peer Hub participant locations – across 96 countries and regions

The Geneva Learning Foundation’s future plans

TGLF continues to create networks of knowledge-sharing and collaboration with no daily participation payment, travel, or other traditional incentive provided. Members of the Peer Hub were driven by their own intrinsic motivation, rather than extrinsic incentives. The Foundation provides activities that create a value chain from peer learning to direct impact on the ground. These activities and networks have outcomes that take participants beyond knowledge retention, to direct practice of digital, analytical, and leadership capabilities.

Over the last year, the Foundation nurtured 15 learning and change programs, 10 global leadership and impact networks, and hosted 200 digital events. Its dedication to the human power behind knowledge-sharing was enhanced by using the Wazoku platform for idea management, and it continues to work towards vaccine-related change:

• Continued effort towards achieving the Immunization Agenda 2030:
  • Reduced mortality and morbidity from vaccine-preventable diseases
  • Increased equitable access to and use of new and existing vaccines
  • Strengthening immunization within primary health care, contributing to universal health coverage, and sustainable development
• TGLF also recently hosted an Event for International Women’s Day 2022, ‘Women Who Deliver Vaccines’:
  • To enable women from across the globe to discuss ‘untangling the gender barriers in immunization’
  • 143 female health professionals from 38 countries set up the event