Director of Programs
Maisha MedsMaisha Meds is hiring! We’re looking for an exceptional project leader with research experience and understanding of the healthcare reimbursement landscape to lead the team scaling our core program across African pharmacies.
Maisha Meds is focused on improving healthcare quality, affordability, and access in Africa. Since incorporating in 2017, we have grown to support over 150,000 patients monthly across Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda with our suite of software products. Our network of pharmacies and clinics use our restocking system to order medicines from high quality suppliers, and we’re testing a variety of payment systems and incentive structures to improve patient uptake of high-impact health products like malaria diagnostics and treatment, antenatal care commodities, and contraceptives. We measure our success by our ability to improve the quality and affordability of healthcare commodities for low-income patients across Africa.
The organization is at an exciting inflection point – we are currently testing our digital reimbursement model for improving malaria diagnosis and treatment alongside health economics research partners and global health funders. We are currently expanding our efforts in Tanzania and Uganda, with other countries to follow. We are moving towards supporting digital reimbursement for the 16 core areas that make up Universal Health Coverage (UHC) as defined by the World Health Organization. And we have begun to partner with global health funders, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical manufacturers to ensure that the diagnostics and therapies required to support UHC are always available at the last mile, no matter how far that last mile might be.
We believe that exceptional service delivery, real-time learning, and an iterative feedback loop are core to building game-changing healthcare programs at scale. We recently secured funding from USAID, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Grand Challenges Canada to test a more transparent and accountable model of delivery of global health funding. This model enables point of care reimbursement for essential health products via mobile money, which has the potential to transform the fundamentals of health financing in low- and middle-income countries. We are looking for a strong leader and analytical thinker to help us build this into a flagship program demonstrating the potential of data-driven healthcare delivery for the bottom of the pyramid. The ideal candidate will:
The ideal candidate will be comfortable with ambiguity, able to respond quickly to changing conditions, and excited that we could be growing the program over the next year from two service lines that we support now (contraceptives and malaria care) to potentially 5-6 (with including an upcoming COVID testing program). In this role, the Director of Programs will lead Maisha Meds program development in Kenya and across the region. Reporting to the Chief Operating Officer, you will:
Develop and lead operations for our core reimbursement programs: With support from our COO and other leadership, you will develop our operations systems for scaling our reimbursement product, structuring onboarding and training programs, ensuring compliance with regulation and best-practice, and ensure that we are gathering learnings and feedback from sites to help us improve our programs. You will:
Lead development of our reimbursement systems: You will develop pathways and protocols; help us structure small-scale pilots and learning activities to help set reimbursement rates and copayments; and help us identify further priority products and expansion plans for new geographies. You will:
Lead engagement with our tech team to support product development and iteration: You will work directly with a team of software engineers to ensure that we are building world-class tech, with a focus on user experience, A/B testing for copayments and messaging, and patient identification / fraud mitigation. You will:
We are seeking someone with a mix of operational and research experience who has worked in and engaged with African health systems. Candidates who fit the following criteria are strongly encouraged to apply:
We would prefer to have you based in Nairobi, with regular travel to our office in Kisumu. However, our team is geographically split and we are open to you being based anywhere in Kenya.
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 across East Africa.
Start date is September 2020, and compensation is commensurate with experience.
About Maisha Meds
Maisha Meds is an organisation 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 4 million patient encounters at over 1,200 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. Recent results from a randomised controlled trial with UC Berkeley showed 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 20 million 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.