Gary Selnow, PH.D. WiRED’s director
WiRED International — like most NGOs and aid organizations — is still grappling with the relentless assault on global health in 2025. Early in the year, it became clear that the rapid termination of medicines and vaccines and the dismantling of health infrastructures in low-resource countries would devastate health care for the world’s poorest people. Many would become very sick. Many of the sick would die.
Our small, volunteer-driven organization, with decades of experience working in underserved environments, stepped forward to use every skill and resource at our disposal. Consistent with our expertise, we focused on education and training as an antidote to the crisis we saw unfolding.
WiRED’s health education team advanced a clear plan: expand our program of community health worker (CHW) training. With an alarming shortage of doctors and nurses, CHWs — long championed by the World Health Organization — are often the only providers available to meet basic health needs in populations with meager means. We aimed to train more CHWs and to elevate their skills and knowledge of health.
Beyond training more CHWs, we committed to developing dozens of new training tools aimed at strengthening CHW skills and addressing the diseases that predictably spread when vaccines and medicines disappear.
And we have followed through!
Expanded CHW training is underway and will continue throughout 2026. We have released multiple health training modules and animations focused on infectious diseases. Our comprehensive approach strengthens CHW skills while equipping them to teach students and families how to protect themselves from disease. We call this behavioral prevention.
Of critical importance is a WiRED innovation: an app that instantly delivers training modules to smart phones and tablets anywhere in the world. The app also provides continuing medical education resources for CHWs everywhere, whether trained by WiRED or by others. Our goal is not only to prepare CHWs but to support their ongoing professional development. WiRED provides all of this at no cost, made possible by our generous donors.
With little prospect of renewed U.S. government funding for global health programs, we anticipate a difficult 2026. We have already funded additional CHW training initiatives and will expand them further as resources allow. Soon, we will release a rigorous advanced CHW training program, available globally, to help elevate the skills of CHWs as they step into the widening health care gap in the world’s poorest regions.
WiRED is determined to do everything possible in 2026 to support communities most in need of health support. We invite everyone who cares about global health to lend a hand and support this work. Fully 95% of all donations go directly to programs, not to administrators or fundraisers.
We remain committed to the belief that our efforts will make a difference and are deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have joined us in this critical work.
