Senior Fellow - Scaling Mechanism

FINANCING ALLIANCE FOR HEALTH OVERVIEW

Financing Alliance for Health (FAH), partners with the government on all steps of financing to strengthen, and sustain community health systems, leveraging primary health care to attain universal health coverage. (FAH partners long-term with Ministries of Health and Ministries of Finance teams to develop different and changing financing sources). FAH draws on private sector knowledge of financial structuring and access to private sector and development finance opportunities to increase and diversify funding options for governments to scale and sustain community health systems.

The aim of our work is to increase access, coverage and utilisation of quality primary health services at household level, in a culturally appropriate manner so as to reduce morbidity and mortality. Community health systems have a proven track record of economic, social and health impact through the thousands of jobs created for predominantly female, marginalised and young community health workers (CHWs).

In early 2015, UN Special Envoy Ray Chambers and Prime Minister Hailemariam of Ethiopia convened a high-level group to assess financing and scale-up of Community Health Worker (CHW) programs in Africa. At the Financing for Development event in July, the group launched a report that outlined the case for investment in CHWs, existing and new CHW financing mechanisms, pathways for financing CHW programs, and principles of best-practice CHW systems.

The report recommended creation of a ‘financing support unit’ (now called the ‘Financing Alliance for Health’) to help countries access financing for health systems (and community health in particular), given the complexity of the funding landscape, the challenges of utilising domestic resources, and the difficulty of capitalising on available funding opportunities. This Financing Alliance would also be charged with identifying and tapping into private sector financing and developing new, creative and ‘out-of-the-box’ models of ‘blended’ financing that combine domestic and international support with private sources of capital, including from corporations.

The FAH (through support from its partners) soft-launched its activities in January 2016 in the four anticipated “business lines” of the Alliance: (1) Country support: the team launched a pilot project in Liberia, which culminated in a set of recommendations to the Ministry of Health of Liberia in December. In addition, the Financing Alliance is supporting work in Sierra Leone, Uganda, Malawi, South Africa and has been asked to consider supporting a number of additional developing countries (2) Analytical toolkit: Refining toolkits to support country costs, investment cases, and financing pathways. (3) Financing products/modalities: Cataloguing existing options while building new tools; and (4) Market building/awareness and education: developing funding baseline, country case studies, and advocacy.

Our Core Values

• Respect and trust as the basis of our relationships
• Challenging and disrupting the status quo for impact
• Curios, passionate and effective in our approach
• Driven to support the well-being of communities.

AFRICA FRONTLINE FIRST INITIATIVE OVERVIEW 

The Africa Frontline First (AFF) Initiative is a collaborative initiative that supports the scaling and strengthening of integrated and sustainable community health delivery in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Under the leadership of H.E. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the Financing Alliance for Health, Last Mile Health, Community Health Acceleration Partnership, and Community Health Impact Coalition are currently the key driving partners of AFF. Through unique partnerships between governments, donors, implementers, and technical allies, AFF will support ten countries in Sub-Saharan Africa in building high-functioning, resilient, country-led community health service delivery systems. These systems will include an expanded and institutionalised workforce of 200,000 community health workers across the 10 countries by 2030. AFF works cross three pillars:

• Financing: Advocate, design and support implementation of sustainable funding mechanisms that enable transformed financing.
• Political prioritisation: Cultivate regional political will and champions to support accelerating community health reforms, including domestic financing.
• Country and community leadership: Partner with countries to ensure that financing mechanisms contribute towards achieving national community health goals.

Anchored within their local context and health reform journey of each participating country, this support from AFF will help them: 

• Reduce excess morbidity and mortality. Advance prevention, vaccination, testing, and treatment to reduce the impact of COVID-19, malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS, and support maternal and child health.
• Advance health security. Bolster integrated digital disease surveillance in the community health workforce to monitor, quickly detect, and respond to emergent infectious disease threats.
• Accelerate economic recovery. Build a compensated workforce of trained, supplied, digitally equipped, and supervised community health workers--especially women--who contribute to the formal economy.

Context for the role

Following the great momentum generated by Africa Frontline First and its key partners such as Africa CDC and the Global Fund in 2023 to mobilise the ecosystem towards increased alignment and harmonisation of investments for community health (see the LINK for more context and the overview of our key partners), we’re looking to expand our team to finalise the design and start the implementation of a collective financing approach for community health. 

The initiative addresses the underutilised potential of Community Health Workers (CHWs). Despite their crucial role in driving universal health coverage, there is a $4.4 billion funding gap in Africa. Acknowledging challenges like fragmented financing, lack of political will, and historical underinvestment, the proposed solution aligns with the African Union's commitment to have 2M professional CHW on the continent.

The strategy involves scaling and sustaining 200,000 CHWs in 10 African countries by 2030. This transformative approach includes a shift in community health financing, empowering governments to lead with comprehensive plans and budgets. Funders commit to aligning investments with government plans, ensuring efficient allocation and unified monitoring. The goal is to collectively elevate this strategy with a broader group of partners, acknowledging existing challenges in the current health system landscape.

Overview of the role:

This role will help elevate this great momentum to deploy a financing solution that taps into multilateral, bilateral, domestic and private/philanthropic resources to fund the scaling of 200,000 Community Health Workers, in support of countries national’ community health investment agenda.

The role, in collaboration with countries, funders, multilaterals and other regional and technical partners, will help finalise the design of a sustainable financing solution to advance community health as part of integrated primary care. The role will be a key driving force to onboard countries, help implement the approach and continue adapting the approach based on lessons learned. This role will also help drive key stakeholder relationships on a regional / global level and contribute to amplification of and resource mobilisation for the initiative. 

This is an exciting opportunity for the right candidate to help build and expand a transformative initiative. Our dedication lies in scaling and fortifying integrated, resilient community health systems across African countries. The ultimate objective is to substantially contribute to closing the $4.4 billion funding gap for community health.

Key duties and responsibilities will include such activities as:

Content and Design Development

Work with a small collaborative of like-minded organisations (regional / global institutions) to finalise and pressure test the design of a collective financing approach for community health. This entails the development and soliciting / implementing internal / external feedback on:

• Research briefs, frameworks, recommendations, and guidelines to inform key design choices for the practical implementation of a collective financing approach on a country / regional and global level, including financing and coordination mechanisms, structures, processes, governance etc.
• Specific cross-cutting thematic areas (e.g., related to sustainability, results based financing, impact framing and assessment, strategic pillars and investment areas etc.) to strengthen the design to meet countries’ needs and deliver the desired impact at country and community level.
• Feasibility assessment, mock-up and eventual orchestration of the build of a country- and regional level digital dashboard/interface to facilitate coordinated investments and progress monitoring for community health (TBC).

Country engagement:

Working with other internal teams from Africa Frontline First and the Financing Alliance for Health and key partners, support the country engagement workstream that aims to onboard countries and implement the collective financing approach in 1-2 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. This includes:

• Support in-country project / program management activities as needed, including work planning, stakeholder engagement, progress tracking, reporting etc. 
• Help develop, tailor and implement country-specific content (soliciting technical content across experts, internal and external stakeholders).
• Support as needed the data collection activities and conduct analyses required to understand community health financing shortcomings and contextualise the design and develop country investment cases (incl. related to fiscal space, system-gaps analysis, financial sustainability, investment baseline, KPIs, processes mapping etc.).
• Support with additional activities relevant to the scope that might come up over the course of the implementation. 

Partnership Management and Resource Mobilization 

• Cultivate strong relationships with various stakeholders – including governments, technical organisations, institutional funders, philanthropies, private sector – to finalise the design, launch and implement the proposed collective financing approach.
• Serve as the primary point of contact for a few key partners, ensuring effective communication and coordination, and concept co-creation internally and with the partner’s leadership, development and technical teams.
• Help co-create investment proposals as part of AFF’s resource mobilisation activities for the collective financing approach.
• Facilitate 1:1 engagements, meetings, workshops and high-level events to cultivate momentum and commitments towards the collective financing approach.
• Help develop and deliver a range of materials on the collective financing approach for internal and external partners and funders to share concept design, analytical findings, and recommendations.

Team contribution

• Proactively drive your areas of responsibility – from start to completion – and bring in others as needed to help advance your thinking and improve the final product.
• Actively contribute to workstream and cross-workstream meetings to help us reach our objectives, but additionally continually improving our ways of working.
• Contribute to building knowledge, sharing experience, and building capacity across team members.
• Contribute to effective project management to ensure timely execution, prioritisation, reprioritization, and knowledge management given the ambitious timeline.

CANDIDATE SPECIFICATION: KEY SELECTION CRITERIA

The Financing Alliance for Health is seeking a highly skilled, multi-functional, and entrepreneurial leader with a passion for global health to serve as Senior Fellow - Scaling Mechanism.

Key experience areas/competencies should include:

• Minimum of 3-5 years of work experience in management consulting, healthcare financing, international development, or another similar field with an advanced degree in business management, finance, health, public sector policy or other relevant field.
• Financing for health: understanding the core bottlenecks behind health financing, the key steps (costing, investment cases, resource mapping, gap analysis), and potential options for financing (traditional donors, national resources, corporate and capital markets sources etc). Have practical experience in health financing, particularly in results-based financing and risk pooling.
• Health systems: knowledge and practical work on health systems, and in particular primary/community health systems; experience working directly with/ embedment in ministries of health and finance (and other government agencies) as well as major donor organisations critical for this role.
• Global mindset and experience: international experience across multiple developing countries, especially in Africa. Have a performance track record in leading country expansion into multiple regions of Africa.
• Stakeholder engagement / coordination: experience in engaging with and coordinating a diverse group of partners, including governments, technical partners and funders.
• Resource mobilisation: ideal experience in dealing with funders and drive resource mobilisation activities. 
• Process management / PMO: experience in planning and managing processes and overseeing progress to realise the objectives of the Scaling Mechanism. 
• Proactive problem solving you should also be a proactive-problem solver, flexible, effective at working independently, self-starter, and able to build your own work plan.
• Tool development: broad experiences creating and refining analytical tools and approaches e.g. excel models, ROIs, scorecards, curricula etc.

Personal Qualities

• Outstanding communication and relationship building skills.
• Strong delivery focused approach, can-do attitude and the ability to handle ambiguity in light of changing priorities.
• A collaborative style with the ability to inspire a shared mission throughout an organisation, ensure continuous development and empowerment.
• A structured approach where efficiency, consistency, performance, and accountability are prevalent.

You will be expected to have excellent oral and written presentation skills, strong computer skills, including MS Word, PowerPoint and Excel. You will also be expected to have full proficiency in English and preferably French. Additional language skills are an added advantage.

You will be expected to travel ~30% of the time.

Compensation

This position offers a competitive compensation package linked to the background and experience of the candidate. 

Timing

Applications accepted on a rolling basis until the end of February.

Application Requirements

Please submit a resume and cover letter to http://tinyurl.com/5bvm5ytf. Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.

FAH values the diversity of the people it hires and serves within the community. Our diversity is committed to fostering a work environment where individuals' strengths and uniqueness are recognized, appreciated, respected and responded to in ways that fully develop their potential.

FAH has a zero-tolerance approach to any harm to, or exploitation of, a vulnerable child or adult by any of our staff, partners or representatives. We are committed to preventing all undesirable behaviour at work. This includes, child abuse and exploitation, sexual harassment and abuse.