# Five years on: What we learned from the COVID-19 Peer Hub could help prepare for the next pandemic

This podcast explores the remarkable story of the COVID-19 Peer Hub, an innovative digital network created by the Geneva Learning Foundation during the early days of the pandemic. As we mark five years since WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, we examine how this unique approach helped maintain essential health services when they were most at risk.

When the pandemic hit, routine immunization services were severely disrupted, placing over 80 million children at risk of missing vaccines for preventable diseases like measles and polio. Traditional training models couldn't adapt quickly enough to this unprecedented crisis. There were no existing guidelines for the challenges health workers faced on the ground.

The Geneva Learning Foundation responded by creating the COVID-19 Peer Hub, connecting 6,000+ frontline health workers across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This peer-to-peer learning network, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, enabled health workers to share practical solutions in real-time without waiting for top-down instructions.

## Key achievements of the COVID-19 Peer Hub:

- Generated 1,200+ ideas and practices within just 10 days
- Developed 700 peer-reviewed action plans for maintaining essential health services
- Created 734 case studies addressing vaccine hesitancy
- Achieved implementation rates 7x higher than conventional approaches
- Demonstrated that participants who actively collaborated had 30% higher success rates

The podcast discusses how this approach challenged traditional hierarchical models in global health by recognizing frontline workers as experts in their own contexts. Instead of being passive recipients of information, health workers became creators and sharers of knowledge across borders and health system levels.

Analysis showed remarkable "cross-pollination" of ideas, with about two-thirds of solutions cited in action plans coming from people working at different levels of the health system than the plan's author. This demonstrates how valuable diverse perspectives can be during a crisis.

By January 2021, over a third of Peer Hub members had successfully implemented their immunization service recovery projects, far faster than colleagues facing the same challenges without network support.

Beyond the initial pandemic response, the network continued to prove valuable. In countries like Ghana, Burkina Faso, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the alumni networks became trusted resources for national health authorities, helping with various health challenges beyond COVID-19.

The podcast also explores the mathematical advantages of peer learning networks. Research showed that properly structured peer learning achieves significantly higher efficacy scores (3.2 out of 4) compared to traditional cascade training (1.4) or expert coaching (2.2). When calculating efficiency multiplied by reach, the differences become even more stark.

Five years after the WHO declaration, this experience offers valuable lessons for pandemic preparedness. Connected transnational digital networks of local actors represent a powerful approach that complements traditional systems, especially when facing complex, rapidly changing health challenges.

The COVID-19 Peer Hub demonstrates that pandemic preparedness isn't just about stockpiling supplies or creating emergency plans – it's about building resilient human knowledge networks that can quickly adapt, share information, and implement solutions when the next crisis arrives.

This podcast was generated by AI to explore articles about the topic. While the conversation is AI-generated, everything is based on published articles about the Geneva Learning Foundation's COVID-19 Peer Hub.