Project Officer-Mental Health, April 2024

TITLE: Project Officer

REPORTS TO: Mental Health Project Manager

DIRECT REPORTS: N/A

BASED IN: Nairobi (field position)

CLASSIFICATION: Full Time Employee

ORGANIZATIONAL OVERVIEW:

HealthRight International is a global health and human rights organization empowering marginalized communities to live healthy lives. Since its founding in 1990 by the late Dr. Jonathan Mann, HealthRight has worked in over 30 countries with current projects in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Our goal is to build lasting access to health, helping to realize the right to health for excluded communities. We focus on 4 priority populations: migrants, adolescents, sexual minorities, and women and children. In Kenya, HealthRight is working in several North Rift Valley, ASAL, Nairobi and Kilifi counties to address issues of mental health, maternal and child health, reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, and other communicable diseases of high burden such as malaria and TB.

PRIMARY ROLE:

The Project Officer is responsible for the overall implementation and coordination of the Mental Health project and all activities related to it, including working closely with the link health facilities and communities in the project site. The Project Officer is responsible for supporting the mental health Project manager and the team in improving mental health services in Nairobi urban slums. The Project Officer directly report to Mental health Project Manager.

RESPONSIBILITIES and DUTIES

· Work closely with the Project Manager and the entire project team to develop mental health project plans and budget aligned to the Government health policies and plans for scaling up mental health services.

· Lead project’s community health components aimed at providing equitable and culturally effective access to health information, commodities and services to scale up mental health services goals.

· Work with communities to identify and reach perinatal women for inclusion in mental health services.

· Mentor Community Health Volunteers and healthcare workers on mental health to support perinatal women service uptake.

· Oversee the routine collection of quality project’s data, providing timely reviews and analysis, and using data to guide/inform shifts in program activities.

· Prepare periodic progress timely and quality project reports and annual reports showing achievements against planned targets as well as providing justification for performance variances and areas of improvement

· Facilitate Quarterly Data Quality Audits for the Project

· Ensure high levels of integrity and accountability for all allocated financial and other resources in accordance with donor and HealthRight policies and procedures.

· Represent HealthRight at meetings, conferences and workshops and other fora to promote and articulate issues related to mental health programming.

· Document lessons learnt and success stories from the field and share with Project Manager.

· Ensure improved individual and community knowledge, attitudes and practices around mental health.

· Support community mental case finding and facilitate referral

· Implement a stepped care model for the integration of mental health services at the primary level of care and strengthen facility health management information systems (HMIS) with emphasis on mental health.

· Develop and maintain strong working relationships and alliances with implementing partners and other key stakeholders in the Sub-county.

· Perform any other duties as may be allocated by supervisor and/or management.

Qualifications:

· Degree in Nursing, Clinical Medicine, Mental health, Public Health, Psychology or Health related Degree.

Other Requirements:

· Knowledge and experience in implementing integrated mental health programs.

· Minimum 3 years of working experience in implementing and coordinating health related projects.

· Experience in implementing the Community Health Strategy

· Experience of working with MoH at the County levels.

· Knowledge of World Health Organization’s mental health Gap Action Programme Intervention Guide (mhGAP IG) and interpersonal therapy groups (IPT-G).

· Experienced in administration of the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9).

· Excellent ability to work in a team and to mediate.

· Experience working in urban informal settlements.

· Possesses initiative and is able to work with minimum supervision.

· Demonstrates adaptability and flexibility in all aspects of responsibility.

· Good report writing skills

· Ability to multi-task and teamwork.

Ability to pay attention to details.

How to apply

Interested and qualified candidates should send their cover letter and CV to the following address clearly stating the position you are applying so as to reach the undersigned on or before July 21^st 2020.

The Human Resources Manager

HealthRight Kenya

P.O.BOX 1019-00502

KAREN- NAIROBI, KENYA

Email: [email protected]

Applications will be accepted will be considered on a rolling basis and only the shortlisted candidates will be contacted.

More Information

Job City Nairobi

Nairobi

HealthRight International

HealthRight International founder Jonathan Mann died on Wednesday, September 2, 1998, in the crash of an airplane bound from New York to Geneva, where he was to attend a World Health Organization conference. He was 51. His wife, Mary Lou Clements-Mann, whom he married in 1996, also perished. Clements-Mann was a world-renowned expert on vaccines and founded the Center for Immunization Research at Johns Hopkins University. Early in her career, she worked in the worldwide effort to eradicate smallpox and conducted more than 100 clinical trials on vaccines from influenza to hepatitis. She also worked on the recently approved immunization for rotavirus, which causes often fatal diarrhea in children in poor countries. Recently she was working on several HIV vaccines, as well as the first trial of one for hepatitis C.

Dr. Mann founded HealthRight in 1990 as he felt there was void amongst the health and human rights organizations in the United States and he desired to create a unique organization whose mission was to create sustainable programs that promote and protect health and human rights in the United States and abroad.

A world-renowned researcher and champion of human rights, Mann flourished on the faculty of Havard’s School of Public Health as professor in epidemiology and international health. In 1993, he was appointed the first François-Xavier Bagnoud professor of health and human rights and founding director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights. In 1998, Mann left HSPH to assume the deanship of the school of public health of the Allegheny University of Health Sciences in Philadelphia.

Mann received his undergraduate education at Harvard College, graduating in 1969, before earning his MD at Washington University School of Medicine in 1974. Following medical school, he worked as an epidemiologist in New Mexico for the US Public Health Service and the New Mexico Health Services Division.

Following a return to HSPH to earn his MPH degree in 1980, Mann began to apply his intellect and skills to forming international strategies for reducing and preventing the spread of AIDS. He founded and directed Project SIDA, an AIDS research project based in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo (then Zaire), that incorporated epidemiologic, clinical, and laboratory components in a collaborative effort of Zairian, US (Centers for Disease Control), and Belgian AIDS researchers.

How great a loss was the death of AIDS researcher Jonathan Mann, killed in the crash of Swissair Flight 111? “I’m convinced that if someone other than Jonathan had been the first director of Global Programme on AIDS, the whole response to the epidemic would have been different,” says Peter Piot, one of the earliest HIV researchers and now director of the United Nations AIDS program. “For example,” he continues, “we may have gotten into a repressive approach, perhaps using quarantine. Because let’s not forget that in the early days there were many calls for that.”

Indeed, notes Newsday reporter Laurie Garrett in her definitive book The Coming Plague, by 1987, 81 countries had passed laws against people with HIV or risk groups, usually homosexuals and prostitutes. In Germany, a federal judge declared it might be necessary to tattoo and quarantine people with the virus. Cuba was already quarantining AIDS patients. Some Muslim states were jailing “promiscuous” people, and Chinese officials denied the existence of homosexuals, drug users, or prostitutes in the People’s Republic. In the U.S., President Reagan’s Secretary of Education, William Bennett, fought Surgeon General C. Everett Koop’s plans for frank education about HIV prevention, favoring instead compulsory testing of all hospital patients, marriage license applicants, and immigrants. Quarantine loomed as a very real threat.

Amid this gathering storm, Jonathan Mann led public health authorities to perhaps their finest hour. Impeccably dressed in bow ties, yet with the gritty experience of running the first major African HIV research program (which, among many accomplishments, showed that HIV could be spread through heterosexual sex but not through mosquito bites), Mann managed to convene more than 100 national ministers of health together in London. There, as Garrett writes, almost 150 nations signed on to a condom-based, compassionate strategy to slow the spread of AIDS. A few months later, he convinced the World Health Organization to make human rights the core of its anti-HIV strategy. These coups played a crucial role in preventing the wholesale repression of people with the virus.

Mann orchestrated this historic consensus from his new position as director of the World Health Organization’s Global Programme on AIDS. At first, recalls Daniel Tarantola, who joined the fledgling endeavor at the beginning, “the program was himself, a secretary, and one typewriter.” Two years later, Mann had rocketed the budget to almost $100 million. His m.o.: hard work, personal modesty, and an eloquence that was at once fiery and logical. “Back at a time when only a few people were screaming” for a humane and effective response, says Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, “Jonathan was an unbelievably articulate and passionate voice.” Mathilde Krim, founder of the American Foundation for AIDS Research, adds that Mann persuaded people with “the force of the argument, the morality of behaving a certain way, and the practical usefulness of being ethical and respectful of others. He convinced people.”

Mann’s message: AIDS is a global crisis, in which no person or nation is an island. More important, human rights and public health go hand in hand: “In each society, those people who before HIV/AIDS arrived were marginalized, stigmatized, and discriminated against become those at highest risk of HIV infection…. The French have a simple term which says it all: HIV is now becoming a problem mainly for les exclus, the ‘excluded ones’ living at the margin of society.”

Mann, who moved to Harvard after leaving WHO, gave a shattering talk at the world AIDS conference in 1996 in Vancouver. That was when protease inhibitors arrived, creating a sense of euphoria in the First World, where the expensive drugs were able to prolong life. But Mann warned that this breakthrough threatened the very solidarity among AIDS advocates that had allowed them to hold back repressive policies. In AIDS, he said, “we all started in the same place: with the same lack of treatment and with the same hopes… The industrialized world, shorn of its technologic armor, was forced into developing prevention and care strategies, to listen and learn from the universally available wealth of human experience and wisdom.” He called for individual efforts, including for people with HIV in wealthy countries to “give the equivalent cost of a week of treatment” to give patients in developing countries basic treatment “or relief of pain.”

His international experiences with AIDS policy brought to his attention the link between human rights and health. He was particularly interested in the effects of health policies on human rights, the health effects of human rights violations, and the inextricable connection between promoting and protecting health and rights.

0 USD Nairobi CF 3201 Abc road Full Time , 40 hours per week HealthRight International

TITLE: Project Officer

REPORTS TO: Mental Health Project Manager

DIRECT REPORTS: N/A

BASED IN: Nairobi (field position)

CLASSIFICATION: Full Time Employee

ORGANIZATIONAL OVERVIEW:

PRIMARY ROLE:

RESPONSIBILITIES and DUTIES

· Lead project’s community health components aimed at providing equitable and culturally effective access to health information, commodities and services to scale up mental health services goals.

· Work with communities to identify and reach perinatal women for inclusion in mental health services.

· Mentor Community Health Volunteers and healthcare workers on mental health to support perinatal women service uptake.

· Oversee the routine collection of quality project’s data, providing timely reviews and analysis, and using data to guide/inform shifts in program activities.

· Facilitate Quarterly Data Quality Audits for the Project

· Ensure high levels of integrity and accountability for all allocated financial and other resources in accordance with donor and HealthRight policies and procedures.

· Represent HealthRight at meetings, conferences and workshops and other fora to promote and articulate issues related to mental health programming.

· Document lessons learnt and success stories from the field and share with Project Manager.

· Ensure improved individual and community knowledge, attitudes and practices around mental health.

· Support community mental case finding and facilitate referral

· Develop and maintain strong working relationships and alliances with implementing partners and other key stakeholders in the Sub-county.

· Perform any other duties as may be allocated by supervisor and/or management.

Qualifications:

· Degree in Nursing, Clinical Medicine, Mental health, Public Health, Psychology or Health related Degree.

Other Requirements:

· Knowledge and experience in implementing integrated mental health programs.

· Minimum 3 years of working experience in implementing and coordinating health related projects.

· Experience in implementing the Community Health Strategy

· Experience of working with MoH at the County levels.

· Knowledge of World Health Organization’s mental health Gap Action Programme Intervention Guide (mhGAP IG) and interpersonal therapy groups (IPT-G).

· Experienced in administration of the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9).

· Excellent ability to work in a team and to mediate.

· Experience working in urban informal settlements.

· Possesses initiative and is able to work with minimum supervision.

· Demonstrates adaptability and flexibility in all aspects of responsibility.

· Good report writing skills

· Ability to multi-task and teamwork.

Ability to pay attention to details.

How to apply

The Human Resources Manager

HealthRight Kenya

P.O.BOX 1019-00502

KAREN- NAIROBI, KENYA

Email: [email protected]

Applications will be accepted will be considered on a rolling basis and only the shortlisted candidates will be contacted.

2020-07-22

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