Senior Manager, Optimizing support to Programme Team

Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance is a public-private partnership committed to saving children’s lives and protecting people’s health by increasing equitable use of vaccines in lower-income countries. The Vaccine Alliance brings together implementing country and donor governments, the World Health Organisation, UNICEF, the World Bank, the vaccine industry, technical agencies, civil society, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other private sector partners. Gavi uses innovative finance mechanisms, including co-financing by recipient countries, to secure sustainable funding and adequate supply of quality vaccines. Since 2000, Gavi has contributed to the immunisation of more than 1 billion children and the prevention of more than 17.3 million future deaths.

Gavi’s strategy for the 2021-25 period (‘Gavi 5.0’, recently updated into ‘Gavi 5.1’) focuses on increasing equity of immunisation programmes by reaching marginalised children in the world’s poorest countries with the objective to save millions of lives. The strategy also includes a focus on ensuring continued success of immunisation programmes in former Gavi-eligible countries, and on providing access to Covid-19 vaccines to address the health and economic impacts of the largest pandemic in a century.

THE ROLE

Please note this is a temporary role for 1 year.

This role will work on an initiative aiming to optimise and improve the collaboration between Gavi’s technical teams – who provide expertise on topics such as the individual vaccines and their programmatic needs, health systems strengthening and financial sustainability in our work with countries –, the teams managing the sustainable supply of vaccines – including forecasting of needs, shaping health and sustainable markets – and the Senior Country Managers and Programme Managers who serve as the first point of contact and integrators of support to countries eligible for Gavi’s support. The initiative is part of Gavi’s operational excellence agenda – a prioritised pipeline of transformative initiatives supporting the Gavi leadership and Board in putting the key organisational enablers in place to accelerate the roll-out of Gavi 5.1 and prepare for Gavi 6.0.

Given the highly integrated and cross-functional nature of the work, this initiative – and the Senior Manager providing support from the perspective of the Programme Team – will be working across all three areas of work mentioned above.

The “technical teams”, such as Gavi’s Vaccine Programmes team, Health Systems & Immunisation strengthening team, and Immunisation Financing & Sustainability team shape Gavi’s overarching programmatic approaches and innovations in collaboration with our Alliance partners and provide guidance and support to individual country approaches and investments. In this capacity, they work closely with the Country Programmes Delivery colleagues who lead engagement with countries on a day-to-day basis. The teams working on the sustainable supply of vaccine, such as the Market Shaping team, also play a critical role in ensuring that individual countries’ vaccine needs can be met at all times in the most efficient way possible.

Members of all teams serving countries eligible for Gavi support work together to make sure that support is tailored to country needs in an effective and efficient way: Country Programmes Delivery staff (Senior Country Managers and Programme Managers), who typically focus on several countries within their assigned geographical region, lead the engagement with countries. They manage risks, help solve problems that hold back programme implementation, monitor performance, and manage relationships with a wide range of representatives from governments, United Nations and donor agencies, and NGOs, in particular the Gavi’s alliance partners. The members of the technical teams mentioned above provide guidance and expertise from their specific technical/functional angle and support the development of specific aspects of the country plans.

Given the intricate and cyclical nature of the work and the differences between support required for different countries, getting the collaboration between the different teams involved right, and ensuring that Gavi’s support builds on the expertise of the different teams involved is a complex challenge. This one-year initiative has been set up to review the status quo of the collaboration between the teams and identify and operationalise improvements for optimal support.

MAIN DUTIES/RESPONSIBILITIES

The Senior Manager, Optimizing support to Programme Team will work with the Chief Programme Officer, their Adviser, the Head, Performance and Transformation as well as stakeholders across Gavi teams to provide clarity on the issues and to develop and operationalize changes to processes and ways of working to address this challenge.

Concrete activities will include:
• Lead detailed diagnostics on the technical and functional support provided and capacity per country, function, or topic area e.g., through interviews, surveys, focus groups;
• Perform gap analysis for the current situation and approach;
• Synthesise findings for discussion and refinement within the team and with different stakeholders, including initiative sponsor;
• Develop hypotheses and drafts on how to address the identified gaps through processes (such as clarifications on service levels), changes to (virtual) team setups and ways of working (e.g., regular check-ins on the service levels provided);
• Discuss, test and refine suggestions with impacted teams;
• Together with Performance & Transformation team, select and refine final options to present for Senior Leadership Team approval;
• Prepare operationalisation – developing, with colleagues from the Performance and Transformation team, an appropriate change management approach, relevant materials, check-ins to ensure the successful operationalisation of the changes;
• Develop and implement a continuous learning & improvement modality.

Note: The essential functions listed in this section are not exhaustive of the job responsibilities; other duties may be assigned consistently with the department needs.

QUALIFICATIONS

ACADEMIC

• Advanced degree in business or public administration, economics, public health, medicine/science, public policy, international development or equivalent required.

WORK EXPERIENCE

• Minimum of 8 years of experience in roles related to health policy, immunisation and/or health systems required;
• Proven experience working in diverse, multi-partner environments required;
• Experience working at both global level and in developing countries preferred;
• Demonstrable experience in strategic programme design, project management, managing partnerships and multi-stakeholder task forces. Grant-, project- and/or programme-management experience an asset.

SKILLS/COMPETENCIES

• Structured strategic thinking;
• Deep understanding of health systems, with substantial experience of programme planning and management (including, e.g., budgeting and legal aspects) in low- and middle-income countries and knowledge of programmatic areas such as equity, supply chain, demand, community engagement, gender, data quality, programme management, and health worker capacity-building strongly preferred;
• Excellent analytical and project management skills;
• Excellent writing, presentation and communication skills including proficiency in Microsoft Office (especially Power Point, Word, Excel);
• Ability to work in a multicultural environment and establish working relationships with multiple teams;
• Ability to work independently, under pressure, demonstrating initiative and flexibility.

LANGUAGES

• Fluent English is required;
• French is an asset.

CONTACTS

• Chief Programme Officer (line manager);
• Adviser to Chief Programme Officer;
• Managing Director of Country Programmes Delivery;
• Managing Director of Vaccine Markets & Health Security:
• Director Vaccine Programmes, Director Health Systems and Immunisation Strengthening, Director Immunisation and Financing Sustainability;
• Head, Performance & Transformation;
• Frequent interactions with heads and senior managers across the Programme Team;
• Collaboration with all teams in Gavi’s Secretariat.