What You’ll Do

• Co-develop advocacy strategies to address political, policy, and regulatory barriers to both R&D progress and introduction and scaling of high-impact infectious disease innovations, with emphasis on complex biotechnology products, in priority geographies. 
• Build close relationships in priority countries to ensure that advocacy and policy engagement reflects and reinforces national priorities, supporting countries to set their own research, adoption, and scale-up agendas, and to exercise leadership in regional and global forums. 
• Serve as a senior resource on high-impact and emerging interventions for infectious diseases, particularly those with potential to dramatically reshape health delivery costs and reach, requiring new policy paradigms, regulatory innovation, and robust public engagement strategies. 
• Coordinate with governments, development partners, regional bodies, and advocacy stakeholders to align infectious disease innovations with national health strategies, optimize financing, and strengthen enabling systems—including biosafety, ethics, and product approval processes. 
• Analyze R&D evidence with country scale-up approaches, ensuring evidence informs policy and financing decisions. 
• Oversee complex, performance-based contracts and grants supporting advocacy for infectious disease product introduction, ensuring high-quality execution and accountability. 
• Manage partnerships and grantee relationships to foster collective learning, advocacy impact, and accountability. 
• Collaborate across foundation teams and workstreams to align products, policy, regulatory, and financing, leveraging cross-sector opportunities to amplify advocacy impact.  

Your Experience 

• Minimum 10 years’ relevant experience with advanced degree in medicine, public health, health economics, public policy, biotechnology, or similar fields. 
• Proven understanding of biotechnology R&D ecosystems, including the regulatory, ethical, and political factors influencing development and deployment in African contexts. 
• Experience communicating around policy and advocacy for complex product introduction and scale, working with governments, academic institutions, NGOs, private sector, and professional associations. 
• Experience engaging with national and regional regulatory authorities, ethics committees, and policy frameworks governing biotechnology and infectious disease tools in Africa. 
• Experience in product adoption and scale in LMIC settings is an asset. 
• Understanding of health systems and the economic, social, and political factors influencing infectious disease outcomes in SSA. 
• Experience building partnerships and working collaboratively to meet shared objectives, orchestrate effective decisions across diverse partners, and align innovation with public priorities. 
• Ability to navigate complexity and ambiguity, solve problems, and manage relationships in a fast-paced environment. 
• Strong communication skills for conveying complex situations clearly to diverse audiences.