Director – Digital Health & Government Partnerships

Role: Director of Digital Health & Government Partnerships.

Reporting to: Chief Digital Health Officer.

Do you want your work to matter? Do you want to use your skills to make a difference, not just a living? Do you want to improve millions of lives, including your own?

At Living Goods, you will have the chance to apply your ideas and creativity at work every day. If you work well in a dynamic collaborative culture, set high standards, and meet challenges with determination and a sense of humor, you’ll thrive here at Living Goods.

The opportunity

mHealth is the biggest health transformation of our lifetime. All around the globe, mobile phones are making a difference between life and death. They allow families to call for medical help in emergencies, help rural pharmacists locate lifesaving drugs during stockouts, and enable health workers to track potential pandemics. In developing countries, mobile phones have also transformed community health at the grassroots level.

We have created digital tools, fine-tuned them, and used them to equip over 9000 Community Health Workers and hundreds of supervisors to deliver high-impact, low-cost community health services. Our true value is our unique ability to connect and act as the integrator of the various essential components of a community health ecosystem together to make it functional and more importantly, performance-based, and impact-driven by leveraging digital and data to augment decision-making.

We now want to take it a notch higher by strengthening our Digital Health team to enable us to customize and build high-performance and scalable mHealth systems. As such, this is an excellent opportunity for a driven candidate to take on a leadership role where you would be committed to building an effective and agile team of digital health professionals who are able to navigate the structured and unstructured work environment and pathways while helping steer the Government led digital programs.

In return, you will enjoy an exciting, innovative environment that supports flexible and agile working. You will lead one of the most important digital health interventions for LG across our core countries, namely, Kenya, Uganda, and Burkina Faso which is targeted at working with Governments to revolutionize the community health landscape in the country. You will report directly to the Chief Digital Health Officer (CDHO) with a close working line to the Chief Programs Officer.

We are looking for someone who can:

• Be a part of the Core Digital Health Leadership Group and work closely with the Chief Digital Health Officer (CDHO), Chief Programs Officer (CPO), and respective Country Directors (Kenya, Uganda, Burkina Faso) to oversee the implementation and provide advisory support for Government led digital health interventions focused at community health transformation, such as Electronic Community Health Information System (eCHIS), in our core countries for maximizing the health impact as well as sustainable scaleup across various regions as per organizational priorities.
• Develop and execute a clear and holistic blueprint for interventions such as eCHIS from a digital perspective in close collaboration and alignment with various departmental units including DH, Programs, and respective Country Teams for supporting the eCHIS program.
• Establish and inculcate a strong partner ecosystem with external partners (Government, Technology, and Implementing partner) involved with interventions such as eCHIS including design, development, implementation, and scaleup workstreams.
• Represent LG in external forums and provide clear, effective, and strategic thought leadership for the Government led digital health initiatives in community health where LG is providing support such as this.
• Lead and manage the development, work planning/resourcing, mentorship, and upskilling of the team.
• Be a leader who has built effective teams that deliver results, technical experts, managers, and future leaders.
• Ability to influence at strategic levels with important stakeholder groups – Gov, Partners, Bi & Multilaterals (Understanding and relations of how these work).
• Broad understanding of digital health systems including platforms& deployments of the same.

Key Responsibilities:

• Strategy and Thought Leadership:
  • Develop the global strategy for our digital health interventions for Government led programs including design, development, implementation, and scaleup as per organizational priorities and technology readiness.
  • Develop global and country-level assessment criteria and success framework for government-led digital health programs such as eCHIS so as to ensure full integration and the service of more efficient and high-impact community health programs.
  • Provide guidance and supervisory support to country program leads through the solution development process, project management backstopping, stakeholder and vendors management (along with partnerships and product manager)
  • Develop standardized global toolkits for digital health program delivery which are further evolved and contextualized for our core countries (Kenya, Uganda, and Burkina Faso).
  • Provide digital thought leadership and active representation/participation for LG in external forums to realize the vision of national scaleup of digital health programs such as eCHIS in our core countries while maintaining the focus on generating high impact.
  • Undertake regular SWOT reviews and risk assessments for identifying gaps and areas of support from a Government led digital health programs implementation and scaleup standpoint.
• Operational Excellence:
  • Collaborate with country digital health program leads to build systems and processes that ensure robust support of the technology implemented and reinforce SOPs established for organizational effectiveness.
  • Lead and advise on budgets, and resource planning for the digital health components and overall project execution.
  • Ensure cross-functional collaboration to drive synergies at various levels ensuring that all functional partners are aligned and working together to drive government-led programs such as eCHIS in the right direction of impact generation at scale. This would entail effective communication, coordination, and project management while working with internal and external stakeholders.
  • Organize and coordinate meetings and discussions with key stakeholders including external partners to eliminate blockers and ensure efficient project delivery. This would include collaboration with senior management stakeholders in an external environment (Government, Partners).
  • Ensure collaboration with the Global Software Engineering (GSE) team in LG and external Tech partners to design, develop and implement reliable, robust, scalable, efficient, and secure systems for interventions such as eCHIS.
  • Provide regular and periodic reports, updates, and insights to CDHO for necessary decision-making and owning the risk register on the eCHIS roadmap.
• Advocacy:
  • Catalyze cross-learnings within the organization’s digital health programs and teams and develop methods to document learnings and generate thoughtful discussion and insights to inform continuous improvement of processes, systems, and tools internally as well as generate materials for external thought leadership and advocacy.
  • Set project structures, and teams and establish alignment with key stakeholders within LG while providing the strategic direction on digital health programs such as eCHIS on technology roadmap while working closely with external stakeholders specifically the government stakeholders.
  • Partner with LG’s Programs and Advocacy team for generating awareness and seeking support from key stakeholders in the system on important ecosystem aspects related to eCHIS implementation and scaleup.
  • Contribute to the organization’s digital health advocacy goals through panels, blogs, and videos based on learnings from LG’s digital health programs.
  • Provide subject matter input to BD for proposal development stages for digital health opportunities and identify new partnership opportunities in digital health to add value to existing digital health global vision and programs.
  • Contribute to policy guidance as it relates to digital health with global, regional, and country-level digital health working groups and networks.
• Qualifications
• BS/MS in Computer Science Engineering / ICT / Public Health, or related field.
• 12+ years of professional experience across the ICT domain and/or management consulting domain with a specific focus on public health programs.
• Prior experience of engagement with Government agencies and stakeholders for national scale program design and implementation would be accorded a higher weightage.
• The candidate must possess at least 5+ years of leadership experience including hands-on experience in one of the following:
  • Program Management Support and/or Implementation of 03-05 large-scale digital / ICT programs involving service delivery, beneficiary coverage/outreach, process automation/workflow digitalization in any sector with direct government engagement. Or
• • Program Management Support and/or Implementation of 02 large-scale digital / ICT programs involving service delivery, beneficiary coverage /outreach, process automation/workflow digitalization in any sector, and 02 small-scale / pilot digital health projects with direct government engagement. Or
• • Program Management Support and/or Implementation of 01-03 large-scale Digital Health program in the space of Community Health with direct government engagement.
• Prior professional work experience in Africa.
• Prior experience working in the development sector is desirable.
• Prior experience in a matrix reporting in a large global organization is desirable.
• Prior experience in managing a team of at least 3-5 team members is desirable.

Skillsets

• A strong understanding of the technology systems, platforms, frameworks, and digital ecosystems including the software development lifecycle is essential.
• A deep understanding of evolving digital health and community health landscape particularly in Africa, including opportunities and challenges and commonly adopted digital health solutions and platforms used in low-resource settings, is desirable.
• A good understanding of government systems, stakeholder engagement, and general functioning is strongly desirable.
• A good understanding of the public health ecosystem and a detailed understanding of the community health program & landscape is desirable.
• Service-oriented leadership and teamwork approach to support across business teams and diverse partners to deliver optimal solutions that meet organization and partner objectives.
• Ability to engage with stakeholders with diverse backgrounds specifically at the senior management level and act as a bridge/translator to explain the technical aspects in simple language including the use of basic data analysis for enabling the right decision-making.
• Skilled in change management and management of various stakeholders with a demonstrated range of influence.
• Willingness to work in a dynamic work environment and manage ambiguity as part of decision-making processes.
• Desirable to have good experience in advocacy and policy development around digital interventions.
• Excellent communications skills, both orally and written specifically with respect to the usage of MS Word Suite including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint tools.

Compensation:

A competitive salary and benefits package commensurate with experience including health insurance and bonus opportunity. The opportunity to be your best while making lives better for those in need.

Living Goods is an equal-opportunity employer and will consider every qualified applicant for employment. Living Goods does not discriminate based on race, ethnicity, national origin, ancestry, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or disability.

Our current job openings are displayed on our website, where you can search for open positions and apply directly. Living Goods does not offer any positions without an interview and never asks candidates for money. If you are asked for money, we strongly recommend that you do not respond and do not send money or personal information.