🇸🇱 Job Vacancy @ Seed Global Health – Deputy Country Director

About Seed Global Health

Seed Global Health (Seed) envisions a world in which every country is strengthened by a robust health workforce to best meet the health needs of its population. Seed’s mission is to educate a rising generation of health professionals to strengthen access to quality care with a goal of saving lives and improving health. Seed is unique in its approach by focusing on the education and training of doctors, nurses and midwives. By training health care professionals and health educators, Seed seeks to empower current and future generations of health providers so that good health is not the privilege of a few, but the right of all.

Seed focuses on strengthening the education, practice, and policy of the local professional health workforce in Africa. Seed’s core strategy and primary entry point centers on placing skilled and qualified educators at partner institutions for a minimum of one academic year. Seed also supports educators and partner institutions through a diverse and complementary package of services aimed at advancing health professional education in the classroom and clinical setting. By investing in long-term partnerships for improved health professional education, we help to create a stronger, more sustainable health workforce that is both locally led and better able to meet local health needs.

For more information, please visit www.seedglobalhealth.org

Position Summary

Reporting to the Country Director (CD), the Deputy Country Director (DCD), clinical and program plays a critical role in driving impact, providing thought leadership, and fostering policy outreach and engagement. The DCD oversees the seamless implementation of Seed partnerships, aligning them with the country strategy, with a focus on leading clinical practice and education delivery in target sites and providing overall oversight of programmatic implementation. This includes integrating educators into partner institutions to achieve partnership objectives, measuring and reporting impact in a timely and transparent manner, and serving as the primary liaison with institutional leadership to identify and foster innovative opportunities that drive growth and excellence.

Duties and Responsibilities

In collaboration with relevant team members, responsibilities include the following:

Educator integration and supervision

• Lead Educator recruitment and placement.
• Coordinate the development of educator scopes of work by liaising with partner sites as assigned.
• Oversee and provide leadership for educator onboarding and offboarding practices.
• Prepare educators and their in-country collaborators for a meaningful collaboration through cross cultural, technical, and contextual orientation in the form of workshops, immersion activities and regular communication.
• Support provision of technical assistance to Seed educators to optimize their general capacity to perform their professional functions as clinician-educators.
• Liaise with other team members such as Finance and Administrative Manager and Program Manager to ensure critical information is passed along and to stay informed of relevant in-country travel, safety, security and logistics for educators.
• Provide educators with day-to-day supervision and shadowing to ensure work aligns with Country strategy, partnership work plans, program quality standards, and clinical guidelines.

Clinical Technical Support 50-60%

• Provide technical and clinical support, supervision, oversight and guidance on clinical practices across Sierra Leone country team and partnerships to ensure high-quality healthcare delivery and best practices
• Conduct regular site visits to partnership facilities and schools to support, encourage, and ensure communication and alignment.
• Collaborate with Program, MEL and Policy team members to align clinical and educational activities and strategies among midwives, and physicians
• Partner with country team and partners to cultivate, integrate, and align clinical practice objectives with Seed’s goals, including best practices and lessons. Learned.
• Provide a clinical/technical lens to MEL strategy and plans.
• Provide thought leadership on interdisciplinary collaboration between medicine, nursing, midwifery and other disciplines in the health sector

Country Program Leadership

• Day to day leadership of Seed’s program work including supervision of program and clinical country team members to ensure program quality and effectiveness
• Provide support to the country director to represent Seed Global Health from time to time within professional networks, communities of practice and technical working groups as delegated and advise Seed on priorities and trends affecting human resources for health in Sierra Leone.
• Support country program strategic visioning, priority setting, and thought leadership.
• Work with the global Program Team to incubate innovations into measurable and scalable pilots.
• Ensure implementation of the country strategy.
• Oversee management of country programs through the partnership life cycle of planning, implementation, evaluation, and scale up or transition.

• Oversee the management of the annual partnership work plan, budget, grant development and review processes.
• Lead and contribute to development of strategic and feasible partnership goals, objectives, work plans, and budgets.
• Ensure execution of nursing, midwifery and medical partner work plan activities are successfully completed, in close collaboration with partners.
• Ensure the implementation of activities and deployment of partnership resources on a day-to-day basis is sequenced to achieve the agreed key performance targets set out in the Key Performance Indicator (KPI), Objective and Key Result (OKR) or other management framework.

• Oversee the management of country-level reporting streams, including reviewing monthly country situation report, partnership and educator reports.
• Ensure effective communication and coordination among other Seed team members in order to promote effective country-level programming and program learning and dialogue.
• Lead the development of the country operational work plan and budgets and monitor, track and analyze annual, quarterly and monthly expenditures and ensure that budget projections are accurate, and expenditures are aligned to impact.
• Lead the review, and tracking of program contracts and agreements, including Memoranda of Understanding, partnership agreements, consultant agreements.
• Support the identification and development of strategic partnerships for country programming.
• Maintain a strong relationship and open lines of communication with partnership coordinators at partner sites for smooth coordination of activities including needs assessments, ongoing program support, and evaluation activities.
• Ensure the translation of learning into continuous programmatic improvements through adaptive management practices
• Participate in cross country sharing and learning with Seed colleagues in other countries to learn and share best practice for program quality improvement.
• Collaborate with the MEL Manager in the process of partnership reporting and documentation of results for continuous quality improvement and learning at the country office while liaising with the Global Program and MEL teams.
• Contribute to documentation and compilation of knowledge management products like success stories, blogs, abstracts etc and review them to ensure contextual alignment.
• Contribute to timely preparation of the annual program and donor reports
• Collaborate with Seed colleagues to disseminate program highlights and learning both internally and externally
• Any other assigned duties

Qualifications

• A qualified and registered healthcare professional (Nurse, midwife or doctor) with a master’s degree in a health-related field.
• A minimum of 10 years’ clinical work experience.
• Minimum 5–7 years of program or project management experience; Preferred 8–10 years
• A strong understanding of the health system and health professions pathways in clinical education and policy.
• A strong network within the health professions and health education fraternity.
• Commit to 50-60% clinical time, including educator shadowing, to inform program decisions.
• Demonstrated cross-cultural sensitivity and ability to build respectful relationships with colleagues from different cultural, linguistic, and educational backgrounds.
• Ability to work collaboratively in a fast paced and young organization work environment
• Excellent analytical, writing, synthesis, and communication skills.
• Ability to work independently and proactively solicit required guidance to attain agreed deliverables.
• Comfortable with high profile liaison.
• Sierra Leoneans or candidates from the region (sub-Saharan) preferred.

Working Conditions

• Based in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
• Up to 40% travel time may be requested, domestically and internationally.

Compensation

Competitive salary commensurate with experience.

Seed is an equal opportunity employer that prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type, including without limitation on the basis of race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristics protected by federal, state, and local law.

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