Chief Operating Officer

Maisha Meds is seeking a stellar operations leader to drive this next phase of growth and impact!

Join Our Team

Maisha Meds is an organization dedicated to improving health care in Africa. We began full-time operations in 2017 and over the past few years has grown to support over 4million patient encounters at over 1,000 pharmacies and drug shops annually across Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Nigeria, and Zambia. We are building the financial and technology infrastructure to enable global health funders to pay for health outcomes at the last mile, with an initial focus on malaria case management, with results from a randomized controlled trial with UC Berkeley showing that our programs lead to a statistically significant 350% increase in appropriate and high quality malaria care. Based on these results, we are planning to scale the technology to reach over 10,000 health facilities and 20million patients, and to directly pay for health outcomes for 1 million patients annually by 2024. In addition, we are actively building programs to support injectable contraceptives, HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis, measles and HPV vaccines, malnutrition support, and safe water interventions.

Our work is funded by USAID Development Innovation Ventures, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada, Pfizer, and others, and we are starting to build partnerships with multilateral global health funders, pharmaceutical companies, and national health insurance funds to have them pay us on a contract basis for health outcomes. We use data from our point of sale software to design programs that leverage financial incentives to improve uptake of high impact health products. And we measure our success by our ability to improve the quality and affordability of healthcare diagnosis, treatment, and prevention for low-income patients across Africa.

About the role

We have had strong growth recently, tripling in network size in the last 18 months, yet we believe we have the ability to support 10,000 or more facilities with our software across 4-5 countries in the next 3 years with $10-20mil+ in annual recurring revenue. To support this growth will require continued evolution of our product offering to enable the transition to a lighter-touch operational model; and will require us to begin to think more deeply around market segmentation and streamlining our product offering accordingly. Underpinning all of this is the need to build out our operational model to one that is increasingly automated and robust at scale.

We require a strong leader with experience in product-led growth who is excited to build our operations to support this level and scale of activity. We are looking for an exceptional professional who delights in leveraging data driven-approaches to build operational systems for scale to bring this vision to life. In this role, you will oversee several core functions, including partnerships development, marketing and training, customer success, supply chain, finance, and human resources. Working across all of these functions, you will:

Lead operational strategy and execution for Maisha Meds: Together with our fantastic operations team, you will guide us to hit important operational targets and milestones, with a focus on sustainability and long-term profitability, including owning the organization’s P&L. Our COO will:

Set growth targets, define annual “Objectives and Key Results,” and ensure that those plans are aligned with our long-term vision for scale and sustainability
Work closely with organizational and country-program leadership to continually refine and improve our operational strategy, service delivery, and organizational management
Lead the team in its annual budgeting process and develop strong, comprehensive, and automated financial systems and reporting
Motivate and align operations, finance, and other teams around this vision and strategy
Responsible for compliance and governance, in partnership with the CEO

Oversee ambitious growth targets and develop the systems and culture to hit them: Maisha Meds has tripled in network size over the last 18 months, yet for us to achieve our potential, we must continue to grow at the same pace year-on-year. Our COO will:

Work closely with the product team to define and iterate on a product-led approach to scale, understanding and overcoming bottlenecks to customer success
Imbue all teams with a deeply data-driven approach to scale including identifying geographies and specific customers based on publicly available data, analyzing health trends to drive program design, and creating customer support workflows based on usage data
Oversee platform marketing at the last-mile, including growing our brand recognition and testing and iterating on models of customer acquisition for both providers and patients
Creating and updating systems and processes to help Maisha Meds achieve strategic goals, and redesign team compensation structures to drive growth and engagement

Develop Leaders and Build Teams: You’ll manage and develop 4-6 senior-level direct reports across 5 countries, and drive career growth and performance across the division. Specifically, you will:

Oversee company operations and employee productivity, building a highly inclusive culture and ensuring that team members thrive and organizational outcomes are met
Provide effective recruiting, onboarding, professional development, performance management, and retention to ensure we are attracting top talent as we grow
Support operations team members as they grow into leadership roles through weekly check-ins and workshops, ongoing development feedback, and regular career reviews

Develop partnerships for scale: Maisha Meds has the long-term goal of transforming how patients and pharmacies pay for essential health products, and we must now develop the partnerships to fulfill this promise. This includes working with ministries of health and health insurance funds in several countries, developing expansion strategies leveraging existing wholesale and NGO networks of drug shops, and creating a compelling value proposition for these partners. Our COO will:

Lead developing of a scaling strategy that leverages existing networks for last-mile service delivery in sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on Uganda and Nigeria
Identify and cultivate the key partnerships needed to deliver on our promise, including testing and validating different approaches and supporting the needs of these partners to ensure program success
Develop an internal “innovations unit” focused on operational R&D to improve our core service offerings and test new approaches and iterate on existing operational models

QUALIFICATIONS

We are seeking exceptional professionals with 8+ years of senior management experience in a fast-growing organization and deep health sector experience. Candidates who fit the following criteria are strongly encouraged to apply:

Strategic leader, capable of developing and successfully executing a product-driven growth strategy – including identifying the structure and resourcing to deliver these programs at exceptional quality
Extensive experience driving results in rapidly scaling organizations, ideally in a sub-Saharan African context.
Talented people manager, with a proven track record of successfully enabling high performance from a diverse array of direct reports
Speaks the language of business, with proven track record in optimizing business strategy and meeting growth and performance targets
High emotional intelligence and adept at handling sensitive or nuanced issues as they arise.
Humility and personal stability. We are looking for passionate professionals that combine strong leadership skills with good humor, patience, and a humble approach to service
Action-oriented, flexible, and entrepreneurial problem-solver, with an ability to manage multiple competing deadlines, dynamically reprioritize as evolving needs and resources require, embrace and structure ambiguity, and drive tasks to completion in a fast-paced environment.
Strong relationship builder with the ability to find common ground, build consensus, and strengthen collaboration among diverse stakeholders
Exceptional self-management and upward management skills and excellent written and oral communication skills
Experience working in a multicultural workplace, ideally in East Africa
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in a relevant discipline

While much of our team is based in East Africa, this role has the potential to be fully remote for the right person (with frequent travel). We’re a small, friendly team that values open communication and mentorship, and we provide benefits including health insurance and 401(k) / pension.

Apply here!

Why You Should Join Us

On a roll: Doubling year over year with new funding partnerships soon to be announced and recent expansion into Uganda, Nigeria, and Ethiopia
Great team: Founded, managed and backed by successful veterans of Stanford School of Medicine, Google, Lions Head Investment Bank,, I&M Bank. We have technologists, clinicians, and economists working side by side to solve difficult problems.
Great funders: We’re backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID Development Innovation Ventures, CIFF, WHO FIND, and Pfizer to pay for healthcare on behalf of patients, with others to be announced soon.
Huge market: Disrupting a massive, growing $50+ billion market for healthcare payments for low-income patients, with a focus on paying for health outcomes to ensure patients get better.
Great customers: Create incentives that ensure our nurses, pharmacists, and clinicians provide excellent care and pay them when this happens.
Impact: A fun and exciting start-up culture that empowers its people to make a huge impact.