CHAI Overview:
Founded in 2002, by President William J. Clinton and Ira C. Magaziner, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, Inc. (“CHAI”) is a global health organization committed to saving lives, reducing the burden of disease and strengthening integrated health systems in the developing world.
CHAI Health Workforce Background:
A skilled health workforce is the backbone of every health system and therefore an essential precondition for progress toward universal health coverage (UHC). However, the WHO estimates that there is a global shortage of 17 million health workers, and the shortage is expected to further worsen in Africa and Southeast Asia by 2030.[1] Although the workforce landscape in every country is unique, governments of most low-income countries face two major barriers to workforce scale-up: (1) Production constraints, namely the ability of national universities and schools to provide high quality pre-service training at scale for the cadres and specialties required to meet service delivery demands, and (2) Financing constraints, primarily but not limited to the capacity of the government to finance health workforce production, and salaries. As such, CHAI’s Health Workforce Programs focus primarily on achieving transformative, long-term improvements in the quality and scale of pre-service education that are complemented by interventions to improve the financial and management sustainability of an expanded workforce.
CHAI assists governments to design, mobilize resources for and implement health workforce strategies that move beyond marginal improvements toward transformational changes in the quantity and composition of their workforce. Specifically, in many contexts, CHAI supports governments to develop health workforce strengthening programs that emphasize the following areas: 1) strengthening the capacity (faculty, infrastructure, management) of national training institutions, and 2) improving governments’ capacity to optimally deploy, finance and manage their health workers.
CHAI’s work in the first focal area includes engaging academic partners to deploy visiting faculty who help fill critical faculty gaps while also building the capacity of host institutions and faculty to deliver high quality education. This novel approach stems from CHAI’s engagement with the Government of Rwanda. In 2011, in response to a request from the Government of Rwanda to improve the education and training of health professionals, CHAI developed an academic consortium of 25+ US academic institutions with exceptional expertise in medical, nursing, midwifery and health management education. Institutions were invited to recruit and deploy visiting faculty with the aim of improving training capacity at the University of Rwanda and affiliated teaching hospitals. This model eschewed the “fly-in-fly-out”? approach historically taken by foreign academic institutions and visiting faculty in favor of recruiting visiting faculty who could remain for the full academic calendar and better serve Rwanda’s educational capacity building needs. In the first few years of the Rwanda Human Resources for Health Program, nearly 100 US faculty were deployed annually. This successful model has since been adapted in Liberia at the request of the government and is anticipated to be a central feature to a new health workforce engagement in Ethiopia.
Such health workforce interventions require significant investment over long periods of time and are benefited by both a diversity of funding streams and committed implementing partners. A significant part of CHAI’s work is not only developing evidence-based intervention plans, but helping governments mobilize the resources required to implement those ambitious plans. For example, in Liberia, CHAI has assisted the government to mobilize over $100 million in commitments from several bilateral and multilateral donors to fund planned interventions that will help the government dramatically scale the quantity and improve the quality of its health workforce.
CHAI currently has active health workforce programs in Liberia, Malawi, Sierra Leone and Zambia; a new program in Ethiopia will begin in 2018.
Position Overview:
The Program Manager, Academic Partnerships and Resource Mobilization, will support CHAI’s government partners to facilitate existing partnerships with academic institutions and develop new partnerships with additional institutions as needed. Additionally, the Program Manager will develop and maintain relationships with key donors and seek funding opportunities to ensure sufficient investment levels are maintained throughout the course of planned interventions. Active programs include: the Rwanda Human Resources for Health Program – a $150 Million program in total, which is currently in year six of seven; the Liberia Health Workforce Program – a $200 Million program in total, which is currently in year two of seven. A similar program is being designed in Ethiopia to increase access to specialty services through strengthening medical specialty and mid-level provider education; interventions are expected to be launched before the 2019-2020 academic year. The Program Manager will support resource mobilization activities for these priority country programs as well as any other health workforce program opportunities that arise.
In addition to supporting resource mobilization activities, the Program Manager will facilitate relationships with key academic partners who have supported the deployment of visiting faculty to Rwanda and Liberia in order to streamline foreign faculty support in Ethiopia and other future engagements. In both Rwanda and Liberia, the government and local stakeholders are primarily responsible for coordinating with foreign academic institutions; however, CHAI has continued to engage with all stakeholders to support communications, strategic planning and streamline engagement. As CHAI supports the Government of Ethiopia to engage academic institutions, the Program Manager will help facilitate such partnerships to ensure alignment.
The role can be based in CHAI program countries in Africa, pending leadership approval, or the United States. The role will involve significant travel.
[1] Liu, Jenny X., et al. “Global health workforce labor market projections for 2030.” Human resources for health 15.1 (2017): 11.
Academic Partnerships
- Develop and maintain strong working relationships with existing and new academic partners
- Develop and maintain strong working relationships with government focal points
- Identify additional academic partners as needed for existing and new programs
- Facilitate relationship management between academic partners, governments and local training institutions in Liberia, Rwanda and Ethiopia with the aim of maximizing investments for host governments
- Develop and execute MoUs and contracts between governments and academic institutions
- Troubleshoot academic partner programmatic and administrative issues with local stakeholders (e.g. faculty deployment timelines, malpractice coverage, taxation)
- Provide coordination support to country teams to convene government and academic stakeholders as necessary
- Provide guidance to CHAI country teams that are exploring options for foreign faculty recruitment and development of academic programs
Resource Mobilization
- Identify, develop and maintain strong relationships with potential and existing donors
- Support the development of proposals and programmatic deliverables to solicit resources for partner governments as well as for CHAI
- Coordinate inputs from teams within CHAI and external stakeholders to ensure comprehensive, technically robust proposals
- Develop comprehensive program narratives, budgets and summaries for proposals
- Manage grant submission process and follow-ups necessary to secure resources
- Complete donor reports and filing as necessary for various grants
- Develop and utilize tools to improve in-country donor and partner coordination to maximize existing available resources
- Perform other tasks as necessary
- Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent plus 6 years work experience; or Advanced Degree plus 3 years work experience
- Exceptional written and verbal communication skills in English, and the ability to communicate effectively with people of varied professional, cultural, and educational backgrounds
- Demonstrated strong analytical, leadership, and problem solving skills
- Ability to work independently and effectively in high-pressure, fast-paced environment and handle multiple tasks simultaneously
- Ability to work with teams across time zones and locations
- Ability to develop, manage and maintain work plans with staff located in various geographies
- Ability to work with humility and achieve results
- High levels of proficiency in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and internet applications
Advantages:
- Demonstrated experience working with academic institutions including universities and academic medical centers
- Experience working in low-income countries
- Familiarity with global health issues
- Demonstrated experience mobilizing resources
More Information
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