This article is based on Zapnito CEO Charles Thiede’s interview of Reda Sadki on 16 September 2019.
“I knew we had hit gold when a young doctor in Ghana was able to turn what he learned into action – and get results that improved the health outcome prospects of every pregnant woman in his district – in just four weeks,” says Reda Sadki, founder of the Geneva Learning Foundation. “His motivation was being part of this global network, this global community, but his focus was on local action.”
The transformation from classroom learning to immediate implementation in a healthcare setting taught Sadki something profound about how people learn to lead change when facing life-threatening emergencies. For the Geneva Learning Foundation, which he founded just three years ago, this connection between knowledge and action is not accidental. It is the result of a deliberate methodology that challenges conventional assumptions about professional development in crisis response.
Speaking with Charles Thiede, CEO of Zapnito, in a September 2019 interview, Sadki outlined his organization’s mission: research and development to find better ways to learn, foster new forms of leadership, and lead change in humanitarian development and global health work. The foundation operates at the intersection of urgent need and institutional capacity, working with major international organizations while reaching practitioners directly in communities across 137 countries.
The reluctant learning systems manager
Sadki’s path to founding the Geneva Learning Foundation began with twenty years of community organizing, working directly with families facing poverty, disease, and racism in the HIV pandemic. His journey to education as a philosophy for change had its start in the office of an Undersecretary General at the International Red Cross, who asked him if he could “help him bring the Red Cross into the twenty-first century”.
“In practice, I got stuck with managing a broken learning management system that could not possibly do what I was being asked to do, which was address a network of 17 million volunteers working in 137 countries and figure out how to support their learning needs using digital means,” Sadki recalls.
The system failure forced fundamental questions about community building, organizational culture, and the relationship between formal learning and practical application. Rather than simply fixing the technology, Sadki began examining why traditional learning approaches consistently failed to produce the leadership capabilities needed for complex humanitarian challenges.
That broken learning platform became the fastest-growing information system in the global network for two simple but breakthrough insights. Sadki figured out that it was about culture, weaving technology into daily life. And that learning is about producing knowledge, not consuming information.
This questioning led him to seek out networks of cutting-edge educators from higher education, including George Siemens, one of the founding figures in massive open online courses, or Bill Cope, who was busy building the technological implementation of his “new learning” pedagogy. Sadki’s approach was direct: these educators were transforming higher education, but could their insights apply to people facing life-threatening emergencies?
“You challenge them by saying, well, you are doing this cutting-edge work with higher education, but in development, humanitarian, and global health work, in terms of learning, education, and training, we have some challenges,” Sadki explains. “They all said yes” to contribute to the foundation’s early work.
Communities of action, not practice
The Geneva Learning Foundation’s core innovation emerged from recognizing a persistent disconnect in professional development: the gap between stopping work to learn and applying that learning to solve immediate problems. Traditional training programs, Sadki observed, create what he calls “communities of practice,” which “basically, mostly do not work.”
Instead, the foundation developed what they term “communities of action”—networks of practitioners united by shared purpose and mission rather than simply shared professional interests. The distinction matters because people facing emergencies cannot afford learning that exists separate from implementation.
“We produce the kinds of learning outcomes that you get through training, but also go beyond that,” Sadki notes. “We have people come out after a very short time connected to each other, feeling empowered by each other as peers.”
The foundation’s “Scholar package” represents a systematic approach to creating these communities around virtually any thematic area or operational challenge. The methodology integrates learning with immediate application, enabling practitioners to develop capabilities while simultaneously addressing urgent problems in their specific contexts.
Measuring what matters
The foundation’s latest innovation, the Impact Accelerator, launched in July 2019, addresses one of the most persistent problems in organizational learning: demonstrating concrete results rather than participation metrics or satisfaction scores.
“In learning and development, every Chief Learning Officer has this dilemma,” Sadki explains. “How do you demonstrate impact that you are not just a cost center within the organization?”
The Impact Accelerator functions as both monitoring system and empowerment network, tracking participants as they move from learning to implementation while providing peer support and accountability mechanisms. The system measures real-world applications—like the Ghanaian doctor’s vaccination information program—rather than quiz scores or completion rates.
The foundation recently completed piloting this component with results that exceeded expectations from both their team and their partners. One major partner and donor declared they were “doing magic,” recognition that reflects the foundation’s ability to deliver outcomes that larger, better-funded organizations often struggle to achieve.
The execution imperative
Sadki’s reflection on organizational effectiveness reveals his pragmatic approach to institutional change: “At the end of the day, you are judged by execution. You can have nice ideas and a lofty mission, but what are you actually able to deliver.”
This focus on execution shapes the foundation’s work across multiple complex challenges, from immunization programs to gender in humanitarian emergencies. Their current projects include helping organizations ensure that the specific needs of men, women, boys, and girls are addressed in crisis response, ensuring that nobody gets left behind even in the most complicated emergency situations.
The foundation’s approach addresses critical gaps in global capacity: the world faces challenges requiring people with skill combinations that currently do not exist in sufficient numbers. Their focus on leadership development recognizes that effective responses require capabilities at every level, from community organizing to international coordination.
Digital transformation as democratic access
The foundation’s methodology leverages what Sadki calls the “ubiquitous affordability of digital transformation,” creating what he terms a “whole new economy of effort.” This technological access enables direct engagement with communities rather than working exclusively through institutional gatekeepers.
“As educators, we are addressing people everywhere and anywhere,” Sadki explains. While the foundation works with the world’s largest international organizations—UN agencies, Red Cross and Red Crescent movement, major international NGOs—their educational approach reaches practitioners directly where they work.
This dual approach reflects Sadki’s understanding that effective change requires both institutional support and grassroots capability. The foundation operates as a bridge between global resources and local implementation, creating networks that connect individual practitioners to larger systems while maintaining focus on immediate, practical problems.
The privilege of purpose
When asked about his daily motivation, Sadki frames his work in terms of connection and privilege. “I have spent my entire adult life working on things that I am passionate about, committed to, and that hopefully have not been detrimental to the world,” he says. “I realize not everyone gets to do that.”
This sense of purpose extends beyond personal satisfaction to encompass the foundation’s role in connecting practitioners across geographical and institutional boundaries. The organization serves as both educator and network facilitator, enabling practitioners to share successes, discuss challenges, and maintain motivation for continued innovation.
For Sadki, the foundation’s impact is most visible in these individual connections: receiving updates on achievements from practitioners worldwide, connecting at unusual hours due to time zone differences, responding to urgent needs from colleagues facing immediate crises. These relationships embody the foundation’s core insight that learning and leadership development must be embedded in the actual work of responding to complex challenges.
The Geneva Learning Foundation’s model suggests that professional development in crisis response requires more than knowledge transfer—it demands the creation of networks capable of translating learning into immediate action. In a world where humanitarian emergencies and global health challenges increasingly require rapid adaptation and innovation, the foundation’s approach offers a framework for transforming how organizations develop the leadership capabilities they desperately need.
