Locations: Johannesburg, South Africa & Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Deadline: 3 Sep 2023
Job Description
The Foundation
We are the largest nonprofit fighting poverty, disease, and inequity around the world. Founded on a simple premise: people everywhere, regardless of identity or circumstances, should have the chance to live healthy, productive lives. We believe our employees should reflect the rich diversity of the global populations we aim to serve. We provide an exceptional benefits package to employees and their families which include comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with no premiums, generous paid time off, paid family leave, foundation-paid retirement contribution, regional holidays, and opportunities to engage in several employee communities. As a workplace, we’re committed to creating an environment for you to thrive both personally and professionally.
The Team
The Africa Team works to enable the foundation’s ambitious goals of scaling evidence-based interventions that target a range of disease and socio-economic conditions which are endemic across Sub-Saharan Africa. The team executes its responsibility through direct country engagement to deploy interventions and delivery models, and by building the partner architecture to replicate successful interventions and models across multiple countries.
Our Africa Data and Digital Portfolio seeks to support and invest in country and regional institutions within the continent with the aim of capitalizing on the demographic dividend of young local talent and helping governments strengthen systems and sequence reforms in pragmatic, coordinated and cost-effective ways that will both enhance the transparency and use of data for delivery and inform effective resource allocation in budget constrained environments. It aims to help governments systematically and responsibly harness, test and scale the potential of digital transformation and automation in improving efficiencies and accountability in transactional and operational systems and increasing citizen inclusion. We are conscious of digital hype and concerned about digital exclusion, and have a pragmatic focus on supporting governments to ensure basic preconditions of people and institutions are in place to enable the full utility that automation and digital resources may have to offer.
Our portfolio is driven by a set of core principles that include a strong belief in country ownership; the importance of helping governments have choice and make informed evidence based decisions; strengthening coordination and reducing fragmentation; sequential and long term approaches to change; investing in local ecosystems especially harnessing the power of youth and women; and the ability to experiment, test, innovate and build evidence to inform responsible scale up of interventions with a grounded and deep understanding of country contexts, realities and starting points.
Your Role
The Senior Program Officer, Digital Africa is a member of the Africa Digital and Data Portfolio within the broader Africa Team.
We are looking for an energetic Digital Leader, with extensive practical experience in nurturing and growing national scale systems in Africa, with technical knowledge and expertise on a variety of health related transactional and operational systems, and the ability to support governments use automation to improve transactional efficiency, transparency and accountability. The postholder will be a pragmatic leader with deep knowledge and practical experience in supporting governments to enhance their core digital public infrastructure, especially national and service ID systems. We are looking for someone that is not swayed by hype, but rather has the practical ability to help governments responsibly make informed, sequenced and cost-conscious choices on digital goods based on ground realities.
This is an exciting role where you get to play multiple functions that include:
- Technical advisor and honest broker to government requests who are seeking to deploy digital systems.
- Grant maker to help invest in and strengthen national digital ecosystems and support reformists and champions within countries to move the needle.
- § Connector and collaborator who can identify, work with and crowd in a range of internal, global, national, public and private partners over common agendas.
- Economic steward who helps think through cost benefit options from the onset.
- Technical and critical evaluator who helps generate evidence and critically help evaluate and distinguish between digital hype and digital opportunity.
- Risk taker and innovator who can help test and try out innovative solutions within country contexts.
- Mentor and coach where you get to work with, take bets, inspire and be inspired by young talent across the continent.
- Continuous learner and listener where you get to immerse yourself in the ground where citizens are struggling to access basic services and critically question what role, if any, can digital investments play to improve conditions based on the realities you experience.
This role reports directly to the Portfolio Lead, Data and Digital, Africa and will work closely with, collaborate and co-create with selected teams across the foundation that share common principles.
The post holder can be based at the foundation’s offices in Johannesburg or Addis Ababa.
What You’ll Do
1) Automation and Digitization of Operational and Transactional Systems (largely health systems focused)
- Too many digital deployments have tended to take a software first and data extraction approach to systems without adequately understanding the nature of business processes or understanding how automation and digitization could help improve operational and transactional efficiencies with data being the by-product of these efforts, not the core product. This role will lead investments, thought partnership and technical advice to countries wanting to move the needle in this space with a primary (but not exclusive) focus on health delivery systems. We see opportunities of automation and digitization in facility licensing, certification and registration; supply chain shipment data systems; and remote performance tracking systems. We also see the opportunity to explore innovations in transactional systems linked to civil registration systems that could potentially be linked with service IDs.
2) Unique ID / Service ID – Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) and Goods (country support and deployment advice)
- As more countries start trying to deploy digital infrastructure, especially digital IDs, governments are facing multiple considerations from vendor choices to pressure to scale without adequate testing or human and institutional infrastructure to scale. There have been enough examples of deployments failing due to poor sequencing and planning, resulting in wastage of scarce resources or exclusion of citizens. This role will lead investments, thought partnership, and technical advice supporting governments and local digital ecosystems to help set them up for success. This role will collaborate with several teams within the foundation who have been working, testing and innovating within the DPI space including identifying opportunities for south-south collaboration with countries that have been successful in nurturing their digital public infrastructure.
3) African Digital Ecosystem Strengthening and Collaboration
- Make investments to strengthen local digital ecosystems, increase networks and collaborations with both public and private sectors, assess opportunities for engagement particularly supporting youth and women within these ecosystem strengthening efforts. Identify, co-create and work with champions and reformists within the continent who are striving to move the needle in this space.
4) Global Donor and Partner Coordination and Engagement
- Build collaborations and partnership with core global funders, investors and others to increase return on investment, reduce fragmentation and practically sequence reforms. Support cross-fertilization of ideas and learn from experiences in other countries.
5) Internal Technical Advisory, Thought Partnership, Critical Thinking and Leadership
- Play a key role in providing technical advice and leadership within the foundation and represent the Africa team when needed to provide critical thinking and strategic direction based on pragmatic experience and country realities. Provide core technical and advisory support to our country offices in the continent. Crowdsource financing internally for coordinated grant making. Lead end to end work focusing on tangible problem-solving areas.
6) Other cross cutting functional roles
- Develop and manage a portfolio of grants using a variety of creative mechanisms, from direct solicitation to managing call for proposals.
- Maintain and nurture relationships with core public and private sector champions in country.
- Generate evidence and lessons and support evaluation of investments and processes.
- Manage budgets and returns on investments with a keen eye on cost efficiencies.
- Seek opportunities to coordinate and synergize investments where appropriate and avoid redundancy and duplication across foundation teams and partners.
- Synthesize and conduct data analysis and communicate work progress in various forums.
Your Experience
- Advanced degree in a relevant field.
- A minimum of 8 years of practical experience supporting the deployment and scaling of digital systems in at least one country in Africa, with a demonstrable portfolio of work related to automation, digital deployment and/or digital public infrastructure.
- Understanding of core public health systems/vital registration systems and/or equivalent experience working on automation of transactional/operational processes.
- Deep understanding of in-country healthcare service delivery, ideally in an African country, with full appreciation for the complexities of implementing and managing in country work with sustainability as a priority.
- Experience in strengthening local digital ecosystems and nurturing local talent.
- Familiarity with informatics.
- Demonstrated ability to analyze and engage with data and draw critical inferences.
- Evidence and experience of collaboration with government stakeholders and champions, and playing a technical advisory function.
- Experience of working and collaborating with global funders and others, including civil society, research institutions and the private sector.
- Experience of working as a grant maker or equivalent experience as a grantee in an organization with experience of grant cycle management, from proposal design to evaluation.
- Experience in evaluating proposal and technical specs and providing critical input.
- Program and/or project management capabilities; from workplan concept development through Implementation, with strong organizational and prioritization skills. Attention to detail including ability to scrutinize budgets against workplans and deliverables.
- Driven and with a healthy bias for action and execution of work.
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills, ability to effectively synthesize data and information to reach diverse audiences, build consensus and be the voice/represent the foundation, including in internal and external meetings.
- Demonstrated ability to work with humility and respect with a wide variety of partners (e.g., government, development, industry, etc.) from a diverse range of geographies, cultures, across sectors and expertise.
- Strong initiative, organizational skills, and ability to work autonomously and cross-functionally while remaining flexible to changing tasks, priorities, and roles and responsibilities.
- Models professional courage – engages in trust-based debate, asks hard or unpopular questions, and is willing to say no.
Other Attributes
- Experience in a role requiring collaboration across and within complex internal and external organizations, as well as a demonstrated ability to work with efficiency and diplomacy without getting lost in complexity.
- Ability to travel within the continent and support countries up to 40%.
Hiring Requirements
As part of our standard hiring process for new employees, employment will be contingent upon successful completion of a background check.
Candidate Accommodations
If you require assistance due to a disability in the application or recruitment process, please submit a request here.
Inclusion Statement
We are dedicated to the belief that all lives have equal value. We strive for a global and cultural workplace that supports ever greater diversity, equity, and inclusion — of voices, ideas, and approaches — and we support this diversity through all our employment practices.
All applicants and employees who are drawn to serve our mission will enjoy equality of opportunity and fair treatment without regard to race, color, age, religion, pregnancy, sex, sexual orientation, disability, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, and prior protected activity.
Application deadline: 3 September 2023