Resolve to Save Lives (RTSL) is a global health organization that partners locally and globally to create and scale solutions to the world’s deadliest health threats. Millions of people die from preventable health threats. We collaborate to close the gap between proven, life-saving solutions and the people who need them. Since 2017, we’ve worked with governments and other partners in more than 60 countries to save millions of lives. We work toward a future where people live longer, healthier lives, communities flourish, and economies thrive. This is an ambitious vision, and it inspires us and our partners to make progress every day.
Resolve to Save Lives' Prevent Epidemics program works closely with Ministries of Health and national public health institutes in Africa to strengthen epidemic preparedness capacity, accelerate disease detection and response, and effectively use data to inform action. In addition to direct partnerships with governments, we also work with implementing partners, including the US CDC, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and the Global Health Advocacy Incubator, to implement programs, prototype innovations, and ensure sustainability through increased national ownership, including domestic budget allocations.
Our Leadership, Governance and Financing team (LGF) helps build leadership and management capacities, fostering public health institutional strengthening. We also support countries improve access to and use of sustainable financing for multisectoral preparedness. Through leadership, systems thinking, and change management approaches, we help partners work collaboratively, leverage political commitment, and use resources effectively to support data-driven decision-making. We strengthen the institutional foundations that enable NPHIs to operate as high-reliability organizations, including leadership, governance, sustainable financing, partnerships, and the administrative systems needed to translate strategy into action. In countries such as Zambia, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, we tailor our support to country context through embedded technical support, co-design with government teams, and structured, shared learning across countries.
Position Purpose:
Fast outbreak detection and response depend on systems most people never see: reagents procured in time, funds reaching response teams in days, the right staff hired before an outbreak peaks. When these fail, responses are late, and late responses cost lives.
The Technical Advisor, Institutional Strengthening & Delivery advances RTSL's institutional strengthening agenda ensuring the “backbone” operational systems support the lifesaving work of NPHAs. The Technical Advisor will work across a portfolio of National Public Health Agencies in Ethiopia, Nigeria, Zambia, and DRC, as part of our Collaborative Surveillance project supported by the Gates Foundation. The role spans the full scope of NPHA organizational strengthening: leadership development, governance and legal mandate, financing and resource mobilization, partnership coordination, and administrative readiness.
NPHA organizational strengthening is a growing emphasis of our work. Drawing on methodology developed and tested at Zambia's NPHI, the Technical Advisor will help NPHAs redesign the planning, finance, procurement, and HR systems that most constrain delivery, working directly with NPHI teams and Delivery Units through co-design workshops, management coaching, and execution support, while building what works into a replicable approach. The Technical Advisor will also help NPHIs access, absorb, and account for external funding from partners including the World Bank, Global Fund, and Pandemic Fund.
This is a full-time remote role with working hours aligned largely to GMT or US EST time zones, depending on location. The Technical Advisor reports to the Principal Advisor, Country Preparedness, and collaborates with a dynamic team of global and country-level experts. This role is for a fixed term of 24 months with the possibility of extension. The role requires international travel.
Core Duties and Responsibilities
- Institutional Strengthening —Country Accompaniment (Delivery)
Provide hands-on technical assistance and coaching to NPHI teams across Ethiopia, Nigeria, Zambia, and DRC, spanning the full arc of institutional reform:
- Backbone strengthening (administrative readiness): Lead co-design workshops with backbone functions and their internal clients to define end-to-end workflows, service levels, turnaround times, and escalation rules
- Support implementation through technical assistance to Delivery Units to coordinate workstreams, track actions, and sustain transformation momentum. Install minimum management architecture — trackers, procurement pipelines, bottleneck logs — that generate decision-grade visibility for leadership. Diagnose root causes of institutional bottlenecks using structured and participatory methods.
- Leadership and governance: Coach mid- and senior-level officials on strategic decision-making, change management, and performance culture. Strengthen governance structures, clarify roles and accountabilities, and use legal and policy frameworks as practical enablers of delivery
- Financing and resource mobilization: Provide technical accompaniment to develop policies and procedures that support NPHIs access, align, and absorb financing from the World Bank, Global Fund, and Pandemic Fund. Build the internal disciplines in planning, procurement, and financial management that underpin donor credibility and sustained fund utilization.
- Partnership and external coordination: Develop process and provide technical accompaniment to NPHIs to improve partner relationships strategically, align external support around institutional priorities, and reduce fragmentation from parallel systems and competing demands.
2. Methodology Development — Building a Replicable Approach
A distinctive responsibility of this role is to learn systematically from practice and prototyping and convert that learning into durable methodology that works across country contexts:
- Translate country experience into structured trip reports, methodology notes, and case studies that support knowledge management and translation across countries and partners.
- Identify what is universal versus context-specific across NPHI engagements, building the evidence base for RTSL's institutional strengthening theory of change.
- Apply minimum-viable design principles throughout: prioritize practical, enforceable changes over comprehensive redesign; flexible for volatile and high bureaucracy environments
- Use quality improvement tools (bottleneck analysis, process walkthroughs, participatory co-design) to simplify implementation and reduce administrative burden and capture what works into RTSL's backbone strengthening guidelines and playbooks that can be scaled to other contexts
- Contribute field-tested insights to global technical packages developed with WHO and other partners (collaborative surveillance frameworks), ensuring practice shapes global guidance.
3. Portfolio and Peer Learning — Coordination and Knowledge Exchange
- Manage assigned workstreams ensuring delivery against milestones and timely reporting to leadership and donors.
- Collaborate with RTSL's global, country, and operations teams to maintain effective, sustainable country-level operations aligned with program goals.
- Facilitate peer learning across NPHI teams — structured exchanges that translate in-country experience into practical guidance other country teams can use.
Required Qualifications
Education:
- Master’s degree or higher in Public Health, Global Health, International Development, Public Administration, Business Administration or a related field.
Experience:
- 8+ years in public health, global development, or health systems strengthening, with at least 5 years managing complex programs in low- or middle-income countries (LMICs).
- 3+ years working directly with government entities in LMICs, supporting public health programs, leadership development, governance reform, and/or health financing initiatives.
- Proven experience leading strategic assessments and planning exercises (e.g., JEE, SPAR, NAPHS) or public administration.
- Experience with and demonstrated ability to design, deliver, and evaluate training programs for mid- and senior-level government officials, with a focus on leadership, program management, and health security.
- Familiarity with how external financing (World Bank, Global Fund, Pandemic Fund) flows through government systems, and the institutional conditions for effective absorption.
- Familiar with organizational leadership, management, and governance in contexts of limited resources and political complexity.
Skills and abilities:
- Institutional reform and change management: understands how government institutions change in practice, what creates momentum, what triggers resistance, and what makes change stick.
- Facilitation and co-design: runs structured, output-oriented sessions with mixed-seniority government teams and converts discussions into actionable agreements.
- Cross-functional fluency: comfortable working across finance, procurement, planning, HR, and governance without needing deep technical expertise in each.
- Implementation coaching: builds management discipline and accountability norms without imposing systems that collapse under operational pressure.
- Analytical rigor: diagnoses root causes of institutional bottlenecks, designs minimum-viable measurement systems, and produces decision-grade analysis for senior leadership and donors.
- Written communication: produces clear, concise documentation that practitioners can use without interpretation.
- Cultural agility and resilience: builds trust across cultural contexts with empathy and humility; navigates complexity and ambiguity with sound judgment and a problem-solving orientation.
Preferred (Not Required) Qualifications
Candidates with the following qualifications are encouraged to emphasize these in their applications.
- Credentials in management or quality improvement (e.g., MBA, PMI, Lean Six Sigma).
- Experience or knowledge of health financing and/or health economics issues in developing countries
- Experience in public health surveillance and/or national public health institute (NPHI) functions
- Proficiency in French highly desired.
- Experience working in lusophone or francophone Africa.
- Hands-on experience in epidemic response and preparedness, e.g., in an Emergency Operations Center, Joint External Evaluations (JEE), or After-Action Reviews (AARs), 7-1-7 and Early Action reviews.
- Familiar with practical applications of behavioral economics or social psychology principles in management and public health
- Experience working within multilateral organizations (e.g., WHO, World Bank, Africa CDC) on large-scale health security programs.
Other
- Able to work remotely during GMT or US East Coast standard work hours, periodically convene in-person for team meetings and travel up to 25% of the time at mutually agreed times.
Compensation and Benefits:
Resolve to Save Lives prides itself on cultivating a supportive, connected remote team doing work that matters. We do everything possible to ensure our employees are connected and set up for success.
The starting salary range for this position is $98,000 to $116,000 annually. The exact offer will be determined by various factors, such as the candidate's skills and experience relative to the requirements of the role. For applicants based outside the US, salaries are set according to national labor rates for the international NGO sector.
In addition to a competitive salary, Resolve to Save Lives provides a generous package of benefits, including:
- Health insurance for you and your dependents
- Contributions toward retirement
- Paid annual leave and sick leave, in addition to public holidays
- Two paid, week-long organization-wide breaks at mid-year and end-of-year
- Professional development and home office setup benefits
- Up-to-date computer equipment
RTSL believes its programs are strengthened when they are developed and supported by individuals with diverse life experiences whose understanding of social and cultural issues can help make our work and workforce more inclusive. We encourage applications from and provide equal employment opportunities to all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, ancestry, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, marital status, organ donor status, or status as a veteran. Resolve to Save Lives complies with all applicable US EEO laws.
