Country

United States

City

or CHAI Program Country

Type

Full Time

Program (Division)

Health Systems Strengthening - Health Financing

Additional Location Description

Preference to being based in one of CHAI's program countries subject to country leadership approval and/or the ability to obtain work authorisation.

The Clinton Health Access Initiative, Inc. (CHAI) is a global health organization committed to our mission of saving lives and reducing the burden of disease in low-and middle-income countries. We work at the invitation of governments to support them and the private sector to create and sustain high-quality health systems.

CHAI was founded in 2002 in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, with the goal of dramatically reducing the price of life-saving drugs and increasing access to these medicines in the countries with the highest burden of the disease. Over the following two decades, CHAI has expanded its focus. Today, along with HIV, we work with our partners to prevent and treat infectious diseases such as COVID-19, malaria, tuberculosis, and hepatitis. Our work has also expanded into cancer, diabetes, hypertension, and other non-communicable diseases, and we work to accelerate the rollout of lifesaving vaccines, reduce maternal and child mortality, combat chronic malnutrition, and increase access to assistive technology. We are investing in horizontal approaches to strengthen health systems through programs in human resources for health, digital health, and health financing. With each new and innovative program, our strategy is grounded in maximizing sustainable impact at scale, ensuring that governments lead the solutions, that programs are designed to scale nationally, and learnings are shared globally.

At CHAI, our people are our greatest asset, and none of this work would be possible without their talent, time, dedication, and passion for our mission and values. We are a highly diverse team of enthusiastic individuals across 40 countries with a broad range of skill sets and life experiences. CHAI is deeply grounded in the countries we work in, with the majority of our staff based in program countries. Learn more about our exciting work: http://www.clintonhealthaccess.org

CHAI is an Equal Opportunity Employer, and is committed to providing an environment of fairness, and mutual respect where all applicants have access to equal employment opportunities. CHAI values diversity and inclusion, and recognizes that our mission is best advanced by the leadership and contributions of people with diverse experience, backgrounds, and culture.

The Moment — and Why This Role Matters

Global health has fundamentally changed, with significant reductions in development assistance for health. Alongside the crisis that has ensued are some opportunities — increased commitment from Ministries of Finance, a new wave of philanthropy, increased engagement from the private sector, and the potential for technology and AI to transform service delivery and systems.

CHAI's Health Systems Strengthening (HSS) group, and critically the health financing program, is working with governments that are taking this opportunity to strengthen health systems for the long term, demonstrating what is possible, and creating momentum across the globe. Our vision is to make primary health care available and affordable to hundreds of millions of people — averting tens of millions of preventable deaths — by working comprehensively to address the financing and systems barriers to this goal.

Health financing is a key lever and the backbone of everything we do. The (Senior) Director, Health Financing will be at the centre of this critical work — helping countries navigate the transition away from foreign aid including by making difficult trade-offs, optimizing limited available resources, and building the financial architecture for PHC systems that can endure.

This role will report to CHAI’s Vice President Health Systems and NCDs, and will work closely with digital health, workforce, supply chain and private sector programs. The (Senior) Director will oversee a global team and work closely with over 100 staff across countries who are embedded or semi-embedded in Ministries of Health, Finance and Insurance Agencies at national and sub-national levels. They will oversee a growing portfolio of $80 M across 10+ countries in Africa and Asia.

This role is being advertised at the Director level, but may be levelled at Senior Director depending on candidate experience and the outcome of the recruitment process.

Team Overview

CHAI's health financing work began in 2010, focused on aid alignment. At the request of governments and partners, we expanded this work to strengthen domestic financing systems. Over fifteen years, this program has become a backbone capability for the organization — and in the current moment, it has never been more important or more in demand. We find ourselves again expanding the scope and scale of our work to respond to this moment.

The health financing team currently works across three interconnected objectives:

• Priority setting and budget optimization: Working with governments and external funders to ensure that available resources are allocated to their most cost-effective uses. This includes defining affordable, prioritized packages of services; resource tracking to quantify gaps against prioritized plans; and building local capacity for continuous priority-setting. It includes navigating absorption and co-financing requirements as the landscape shifts to ensure that the trade-offs made are evidence-based.
• Service Delivery and Systems transition: The systems that have been built by external aid and NGOs cannot and should not be sustained as they are. We work to develop, find and scale service delivery innovations, and to quantify what catalytic investments are needed to harmonize, upgrade and sustain systems over time.
• Sustainability and financial protection: Supporting governments to mobilize resources and design and operationalize pre-payment systems, including tax funded free care programs — so that the most vulnerable populations do not bear catastrophic out-of-pocket costs as donor subsidies recede. This includes working with countries to improve existing systems to get cash to frontlines via provider payment reforms.
• Budget execution: Closing the chronic gap between what is budgeted, disbursed and translated into service delivery. Across countries where we work, resources are underspent by 13%+. The team works to address the flow of funds — from Ministry of Finance to health facilities.

Role Overview

We are looking for a (Senior) Director who will oversee the health financing program. The right candidate will combine deep technical expertise with substantial field experience in Africa and/or Asia. He or she will have the temperament to thrive in a mission-driven organization at an inflection point – an organization which also recognizes it will need to change to meet this moment. They will not stop at advising or sitting in global meetings but rather bring new ideas, jump in to build-out new areas of work, and lead a team to deliver this work. This person must be as comfortable engaging with funders and partners as they are problem-solving on the ground with Ministries of Health, Finance, and insurance agencies together with CHAI country teams.

This person will continue to evolve our health financing and broader health systems strategy in a changing context, bring our teams, donors and partners along, and deliver measurable results in several countries while establishing the frameworks and evidence base that shape the broader sector. He or she will constantly be thinking about what this ecosystem looks like beyond CHAI’s own engagement.

The (Senior) Director will be accountable not only for how the work is managed, but for what it achieves: measurable improvements in how governments raise, allocate and spend health resources — and a demonstrable contribution to addressing financial bottlenecks to access and affordability of PHC in the countries where we work.

The (Senior) Director will lead CHAI's health financing work across strategy, execution, and team building/management — working closely with CHAI country teams, HSS and CHAI leadership, and external partners including governments, donors, development banks, and other stakeholders.

(i) Set Strategy

• Define and evolve CHAI's HSS and financing strategy in close collaboration with the HSS country leadership, country teams, and governments — identifying where to focus, what to build, and how to sequence investment across a complex, fast-moving landscape.
• Work with country teams on context-specific programs — grounded in the specific political, fiscal, and institutional context of each focus country.
• Advise on how countries should navigate the transition away from foreign aid, working across governments and funders.
• Identify and shape opportunities to mobilize catalytic financing as part of this transition — from philanthropy, MDBs, and other sources — for the up-front investments required to build systems governments can sustain.
• Stay at the frontier of the health financing field and bring relevant insights into CHAI's programming.
• Treat strategy as a living document: build in regular review points to assess progress and make decisive calls to double down or redirect based on evidence and changing conditions.

(ii) Execute Programs and Support Program Management

• Spend time in program countries, building out new areas of work in response to government requests and key programmatic bottlenecks, working closely with CHAI’s country teams.
• Oversee delivery of CHAI's health financing programs across focus countries, working with country teams embedded and semi-embedded in governments to ensure technical quality, relevance, and measurable impact.
• Provide hands-on technical support on priority-setting and budget optimization, systems transition, health financing reforms, and domestic resource mobilization. This includes informing workforce optimization and absorption plans.
• Support the design, operationalization, and strengthening of health financing reforms. This includes going beyond making policy recommendations, to the roll-out and iteration of provider payment mechanisms. It includes working with governments to more strategically engage the private sector.
• Drive progress on budget execution — working with governments to address the flow of funds. This includes addressing critical bottlenecks in supply chain financing and broader financial management.
• Identify and develop new programmatic opportunities — scoping where CHAI can add distinctive value and building the evidence base needed to make a compelling case to governments and funders.
• Leverage new digital approaches and embed AI-powered analytics across workstreams, collaborating with CHAI’s digital health and AI teams.

(iii) Resource Mobilization and Donor Management

• Engage funders to ensure the program has the funding to match its ambition and build resilience against shifts in the global aid landscape. This includes developing high-quality proposals.
• Manage major donor relationships and program finances (working with an AD Budgeting & Reporting), ensuring high-quality reporting, proactive risk management, and disciplined deployment of resources.

(iv) External Representation and Ecosystem Influence

• Serve as an external voice for CHAI — engaging credibly and influentially with Ministries of Finance and Health, development banks, bilateral donors, and global health leadership.  
• Actively shape how the global community thinks about and supports health financing work during this time of transition. This includes building and sustaining trusted relationships across a diverse ecosystem.
• Note: This person will prioritize engagements that directly drive programmatic opportunity or advance strategic positioning, rather than spending significant proportions of their time at meetings.

(v) Team Leadership and Organizational Collaboration

• Develop and lead a high-performing and multidisciplinary team — providing the direction needed for excellent, rigorous work.
• Provide direct management and mentorship to senior team members, investing in their professional development and enabling them to lead their respective projects with confidence and autonomy.
• Foster a team culture grounded in intellectual rigour, collaboration, accountability, and continuous learning.
• Work in close partnership with CHAI country directors and country-based staff, recognizing that the strongest global strategies are built on the insights, relationships, and operational realities that staff embedded in governments bring.
• Collaborate with leaders across CHAI's digital health, workforce, supply chain, private sector, and other service delivery programs to identify synergies, share learning, and pursue integrated approaches where they strengthen impact.
• Work with program leads from disease verticals to address significant financing bottlenecks.
• Contribute to organization-wide initiatives that strengthen CHAI's culture, effectiveness, and ability to adapt to a rapidly changing global health landscape.

• Bachelor's degree required; advanced degree in public health, economics, public policy, or a related field strongly preferred.
• 10-15+ years of progressive experience in health financing and/or public health, with demonstrated deepening of responsibility over time.
• Demonstrated ability to develop and execute strategy in complex, ambiguous environments — translating high-level goals into actionable plans, identifying where to place bets across a fragmented landscape, and adjusting course as conditions evolve.
• Substantial professional experience and understanding of health sector dynamics in Africa and possibly Asia, with an existing network across the healthcare, finance, and development sectors.
• Strong analytics and technical depth in health financing (at least one core area).
• Excellent communicator who can distil complex technical and financial issues into clear, persuasive narratives for varied audiences — from government ministers to philanthropic funders — and who uses communication deliberately to build consensus and sustain momentum.
• Experience in donor stewardship, including leading successful proposal development and donor engagement for large, multi-year grants.
• Proven track record of building and leading teams: Setting strategy and creating the culture and systems required for a high-performing unit.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills in English; proficiency in French is a significant asset given CHAI's footprint.

Advantages

• Prior experience working with or within Ministries of Finance or Health.
• Experience leveraging new digital approaches for health financing, and particularly leveraging AI-advanced analytics.
• Experience in addressing health financing challenges for supply chain, workforce, and broader financial management
• Experience living and working in Africa and Asia

Attributes

• Entrepreneurial mindset: energized by building something in a less structured environment. Execution-focused, with a bias for getting things done.
• Deeply mission-driven: motivated by the prospect of helping countries build health systems that can genuinely sustain affordable, quality primary health care for the most vulnerable — and by the urgency of this moment.
• Strategically adaptive: comfortable building strategy in an unsettled and rapidly shifting landscape; able to hold a long-term vision while adjusting tactics as the context evolves.
• CHAI fit: Respecting CHAI's collaborative culture, while bringing analytical pace and rigor.
• Strong interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence: builds trust across diverse contexts and different players in the ecosystem.
• Intellectually curious and comfortable with ambiguity: this role requires evolving to meet a new era.
• Willingness to travel (estimated 35%).

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