Senior Manager, Country Engagement - Mental Health

Country engagement and delivery leadership (35%)

• Provide strategic direction and support to the program's portfolio of six focus countries: lead the mental health team's relationships with all six MHAI country teams, serving as the senior point of contact for country team leadership and maintaining a current, program-wide view of where each country stands against its work plan, objectives and key results, and the program's monitoring and evaluation framework.
• Directly support a subset of focus countries, sharing day-to-day engagement with the Senior Associate, Country Support, while retaining visibility and accountability across all six.
• Ensure country teams deliver against their work plans and their commitments to Ministries of Health, regulators, procurement agencies and other national stakeholders; identify risks to delivery early and work with country and global leadership to resolve them.
• Represent CHAI with senior external stakeholders, including government officials and donors. Build and hold senior relationships with in-country counterparts, including Ministry of Health officials and national stakeholders, alongside the country teams who hold those relationships primarily.
• Travel regularly to focus countries to work alongside country teams, including supporting workshops, technical assistance, and government engagements during periods of peak delivery.
• Develop a in-depth understanding of the programmatic, political and operational context in each country, and ensure it is accurately reflected in program decisions, funder communications and materials.
• Provide technical support and guidance to country teams across the program's core workstreams, including product registration, financing, procurement and forecasting, pricing and supply, and demand, drawing on the global team, CHAI's Global Markets Team and other CHAI programs, and identify where country teams need additional technical, analytical or human resources and mobilize to fill the gap.

Country-global alignment and funder engagement (25%)

• Serve as the primary bridge between country teams, the global team and the funder: ensure that country-level priorities, constraints, and evidence inform global strategy, and that global priorities and funder commitments are translated into country plans that teams and governments can act on.
• Create and review major reports and donor deliverables, leading the country-facing components: ensure that findings, results, and lessons from all six countries are accurately synthesized, quality-assured and communicated, and that reporting reflects country realities rather than smoothing over them.
• Communicate grant priorities, deadlines, and expectations to country teams clearly and early, and represent country teams' perspectives in global planning and funder discussions.
• Hold a working relationship with the funder's program team alongside the Program Lead, including participation in reporting cycles, review meetings and country visits.
• Prepare and quality-assure program updates, presentations, and briefing materials for the funder, partners, CHAI leadership and external audiences.

Program, financial and grant management (20%)

• Lead annual and quarterly planning cycles with country teams, including objective setting, milestone definition and budget alignment, ensuring country plans are ambitious, realistic, and consistent with program-level strategy and grant commitments.
• Oversee tracking of progress against country work plans, objectives and key results, and the program's monitoring and evaluation framework, and use it to drive decisions and course corrections, not only to report.
• Coordinate across CHAI global teams, including the Global Markets Team, and external partners to align workstreams, sequence dependencies across countries and avoid duplication.
• Support financial management across the program, particularly at the country level: work with country teams to build and monitor budgets, track spend against plan, anticipate reallocation needs and ensure grant compliance, in coordination with the Program Lead and CHAI's finance and operations teams.

Team leadership and mentorship (10%)

• Manage and mentor junior staff both directly and through the matrix, including setting objectives, providing regular and timely feedback, and supporting professional development for staff who report to the role and for country team staff whose work it guides.
• Coach and build the capacity of country team staff in program management, analysis, stakeholder engagement and communication, recognizing that many are new to mental health and to CHAI's program model.
• Foster a strong team culture based on CHAI's values across a matrixed team spanning six countries and a global team

Program development and cross-country learning (10%)

• Set the mental health team's long-term strategy for country engagement, including how the global team works with CHAI country teams beyond the six MHAI focus countries and how it engages with mental health projects not funded through MHAI.
• Lead the capture and dissemination of lessons learned and best practices across the six countries, through briefs, convenings, regular cross-country calls and, where appropriate, joint publications and conference abstracts with country teams.
• Bring relevant learning from CHAI's more established programs and market shaping work into the mental health portfolio, and adapt country-specific tools, templates and approaches into resources other teams can use.
• Support proposal development for a wide variety of funders, including drafting country components, aligning country teams around proposed scope and budgets, and contributing to program strategy, including the scoping and onboarding of new focus countries.
• Other responsibilities as needed.

• Master's degree in public health, public policy, business, economics or a related field, with 7+ years of relevant professional experience, including experience in LMIC health systems.
• Demonstrated experience managing complex, multi-country or multi-stakeholder programs, including planning, delivery tracking, budget oversight and risk management.
• Track record of building and holding trusted senior relationships with government officials, funders, and colleagues across cultures, and of representing an organization credibly in senior external settings.
• Demonstrated ability to influence, align and secure commitments without formal authority, in a matrixed organization where the people whose work you depend on do not report to you.
• Strong strategic and analytical skills, including the ability to structure an ambiguous problem, weigh quantitative and qualitative evidence, and translate country-level detail into program-level insight for decision-makers, and program-level strategy into country-level action.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including the ability to produce clear, compelling reports and slides for funders and senior audiences.
• Experience supervising, coaching and developing staff, including remote or decentralized teams.
• Experience creating and reviewing major donor reports and deliverables, managing funder relationships, and contributing to proposal development.
• Experience with program budgeting and financial management, including in low-resource or country-office settings.
• Ability to work independently, set priorities and manage multiple workstreams in a decentralized, multicultural environment.
• Comfort moving between strategic engagement and hands-on delivery support, with no task considered too small or too administrative.
• Willingness and ability to travel 20-40%, including to settings where travel logistics can be demanding.
• English language fluency, both written and verbal.

Advantages

• Experience working within a CHAI country team, or leading a country-based team at a comparable organization.
• Experience in pharmaceutical access, regulatory, procurement, supply chain or health financing in LMICs, ideally including market shaping.
• Direct experience working with Ministries of Health in sub-Saharan Africa, including in one or more of MHAI's focus countries.
• Experience managing large institutional grants and their reporting cycles.
• Exposure to mental health programming or policy.
• French language proficiency.