Chief Strategy Officer

Maisha Meds is hiring! We’re looking for a visionary leader and stellar strategist to improve health care in Africa.

About Maisha Meds

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 1.5million patient encounters annually across Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Nigeria, and Zambia with our suite of software products.  We are building the financial and technology infrastructure to enable global health funders to pay for health outcomes at the last mile, with a focus on malaria case management (and results from a RCT with UC Berkeley due out later this year), injectable contraceptives, prenatal care, HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis, and COVID testing and vaccination.

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.  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 believe that our model has the potential to increase the transparency, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of healthcare programs in low-income countries by enabling global health funders to pay for results while leveraging debt and equity financing to help achieve scale.  But building these programs will require a paradigm shift from larger global health funders.  Achieving this will require us to:

  • Communicate this value proposition to potential partners, funders, and customers
  • Develop experimental proof-of-concepts with a variety of partners and scale those with most potential for impact and scale
  • Collaborate closely with groups like USAID, Global Fund, GAVI, UNFPA, and program-related investment teams to structure deals
  • Rigorously measure and report on these health outcomes at scale
  • Support design of stellar products that deliver financial incentives by leveraging our tech while enabling interoperability with other tech systems and provider networks

We are looking for a leader with experience closing complex financing and partnership deals and who can serve as the voice of the company to a variety of stakeholders.  This includes:

Lead global health business development, with a focus on paying for outcomes: You will help us to structure results-based financing (RBF) deals, working alongside global health funders and debt and equity investors to enable payment mechanisms for millions of patients across Africa to access high-quality healthcare and to enable global health funders to pay for patient health outcomes.  This work will include:

  • Helping us understand the landscape and opportunities related to results-based financing, including structures like forgivable grants and social impact bonds, with a focus on challenges and risks associated with this approach
  • Developing a compelling value proposition for global health funders to support provider performance incentives and patient subsidies for high-impact health products, including financial models and decks, structuring terms, and winning letters of commitment
  • Leading engagement with global health funders, with a focus on developing output targets, supporting measurement plans for outcomes, working with lawyers to structure contracts, and building implementation milestones

Oversee external communications and strategic partnerships: You will be responsible for external messaging; engagement with healthcare and economics researchers; and partnerships development with healthcare and technology providers to enable us to deliver on the promise of scale with this model.  This will include:

  • Overseeing communications manager to provide regular compelling touchpoints for conveying information about us externally
  • Leading engagement with economics and healthcare researchers, including building partnerships with world-class institutions to ask and answer questions related to healthcare delivery, incentives design, and market intelligence
  • Developing partnerships with technology and healthcare providers to leverage their networks to enable claims processing and incentive delivery at scale

Lead strategy development and support product and evaluation design to bolster this strategy: You will work with our executive team to refine a 5-year organizational plan with related targets and work with both our product team to build a roadmap to deliver on this and our data & insights team to ensure we’re capturing relevant data and disseminating it appropriately.  This will include:

  • Supporting on development of 5-year strategic plan and associated targets; work with operations, tech and other teams to translate this to 6-month and one-year OKRs while ensuring the team is adequately resourced to deliver on this
  • Collaborating with our product team to build a roadmap for care delivery, payments processing, and fraud mitigation
  • Working with our data & insights teams to build evidence base and evaluations plans for our RBF programs

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:

  • Deep passion for healthcare delivery and impact, and strong alignment with our vision and mission; 
  • Record of building funding partnerships and innovative finance models with governments, multilateral funders, and private foundations
  • Record of impactful thought leadership and advocacy to improve healthcare delivery
  • Deep understanding of debates around results-based financing (especially in healthcare) and different approaches to achieving these results
  • Prior experience working in a fast-paced entrepreneurial setting and/or in management consulting
  • Strong relationship builder with the ability to find common ground, build consensus, and strengthen collaboration among diverse stakeholders
  • Humility and personal stability. We are looking for passionate professionals that combine strong leadership skills with humor and patience
  • Creativity with strong problem-solving and analytical skills
  • Fluency with tools to measure health outcomes and pragmatic approach to capturing and disseminating this information
  • Ability to be an inspiring leader in a dynamic, multicultural, and values-based environment; 
  • Advanced degree (Master’s or Doctoral), preferably in public policy, economics, public administration, business, medicine, or public health.

We would prefer to have you based in East Africa, but are also open to having you help build our office in another location (preferably in Washington DC or London).

Why You Should Join Us

Maisha Meds aims to leverage technology to solve problems that affect millions of people across sub-Saharan Africa. Though we can’t offer you catered meals and conference bikes like in Silicon Valley, we can promise you an opportunity to drive real, quantifiable change that literally saves lives. We are dedicated to our work and care deeply about our product’s impact. You’ll join our small and friendly team to grow Maisha Meds into a company serving tens of millions of people.

We offer competitive salary and benefits, including health insurance, 401(k) / pension, [in the future] stock options, and sponsorship for work visas in Kenya.

Send your resume and a cover letter to jobs@maishameds.org with the subject line “Chief Strategy Officer.”