As the Principal, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of health financing across the African continent by working with and developing African capability in health financing to support countries’ progress towards better funded, better performing, equitable and sustainably funded health systems.  You will work with and build on existing networks with burgeoning initiatives such as progressing towards the Africa Leadership Meeting (ALM) commitments on health financing and with stakeholders such as the Africa CDC and incumbent global and regional health financing institutions. Join us in making a profound impact on health outcomes and shaping the future of health financing in Africa.

Genesis is an impact firm founded, incorporated and headquartered in Africa that has worked in more than 100 countries. Uniquely, Genesis is focused on the Young World – the arc of countries with young populations stretching across Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and parts of Southeast Asia. By 2030 four in five children will be born in the Young World, making this region central to the future. With growing markets and young, productive populations, Young World countries have the most positive potential trajectory in the world. It is here that investments of all kinds will have the highest social and economic returns.

Our job at Genesis is to help societies, governments and businesses across the Young World succeed at three fundamental historic transitions. First, reconfiguring economies: creating income for large, rapidly urbanising youth cohorts within a global economy undergoing profound changes. Second, a human transition: a fundamental rethink of how societies, governments and markets can ensure the health and cognitive and social well-being of all those young people, including the most vulnerable. Third, a just climate transition, both to decarbonise and to manage the human and economic impacts of a global crisis that Young World countries did not cause. Critically, our approach recognises that the three transitions have to be in sync: each depends fundamentally on the success of the other two.

To do this work, we are building a new type of impact firm. These are three ways in which Genesis works differently:

• We combine global reach and country depth. More than 80% of our staff live in our impact countries, and bring  deep knowledge and networks to bear on our work. Change happens at a country level, but needs to be informed by global conditions.
• We work pro-actively. We identify transformative opportunities to unlock social value. Then we cooperate to marshal the funding, technology and alignment required.

We blend human engagement and technology to overcome barriers and achieve scale. We have a proven ability to build coalitions for change, find joint solutions, and sustain peer-to-peer learning. Our engagement processes are backed by on-point analytics utilising sophisticated primary data capabilities that we have inside Genesis.

The Human Development team works for a world where everyone can develop to their full potential. We are focused on expanding meaningful rights and opportunities for people who are marginalised. Part of a Global African firm, we are particularly committed to children, women, and young people in Africa and the Middle East. We help governments, their global partners, and private and non-state clients to improve the delivery of key human development services while navigating rapid changes in demography, climate, and technology, and the shock of Covid-19. We work in health, nutrition, and WaSH; youth, education and early childhood development; and social protection and social care. We provide services in diagnostics; regulation; strategy, planning and implementation; financing; service delivery; and monitoring and evaluation.

The Human Development team is constantly seeking to recruit and develop exceptional talent in human development.

We are seeking a principal to develop and lead our work on health financing. This is a senior leadership role.

What you will do

Health Financing:

• At a national level, health financing refers to the policies, arrangements and governance structures a country has for raising, allocating, and spending resources in the health system. These resources are spent in order to achieve certain goals, which might be set out in a Health Sector Plan, drawing on the constitution, legislation related to health, and the current economic, fiscal and demographic context, and usually informed by international agreements and commitments such as the SDGs. Such a goal might include universal health coverage – a state where all of the population have access to an acceptable quality of predefined health services, including primary health care.
• We think of health financing in terms of a ‘transformation cycle’ around raising resources to address the needs of populations, allocating resources, spending resources, and achieving outputs that lead to outcomes for the population. This cycle is typically governed by interactions between the Ministry of Finance (and Planning) and ministries concerned with health.
• In Africa and the Middle East, major forces of change (demographic, climate, technological, economic, and epidemiological) have altered the age, location and mobility of populations, the risks that people face, and the social contracts and resources to deliver them. To address these new realities and prepare for the future in many countries in our regions, we expect that health financing will need to become a more effect driver of system performance, in light of both politics and objective assessments of the key issues that constrain human development; placed within a broader social sector and economic framework; made more efficient; and financed more creatively and sustainably. We are committed to supporting these processes to drive notable improvements in people’s ability to manage risk. In line with our firmwide priorities, we have a particular focus on helping young, female, and marginalised people in Africa and the Middle East manage risk better. We are also specifically interested in working with and supporting African Health institutions – that they become strong drivers and participants in shaping the health financing agenda and discourse in Africa.
• We are seeking a leader who can drive notable improvements in health financing in Africa and the Middle East, particularly for young people, women, and marginalised people. This leader will build on our existing work on human development, in particular in social sector financing and youth, and on related sectors, such as disaster finance, to generate a distinctive set of consulting projects that will realise value in health financing in our focus geographies. We expect these projects to be a mix of projects responding to formal requests for proposals from funders and projects that are proactively created by our team using existing knowledge and relationships with clients of a range of types. Working with the Human Development practice partners, this leader will also build and lead a talented dynamic team working on health financing in a way that meets Genesis’ values of glass box, siyakhana, and plus ultra. This team is growing rapidly, on the back of a solid and growing pipeline.
• This role will also involve supporting colleagues to lead our work on youth skills and ecosystems, including coaching and mentoring around our youth strategy, leading project acquisition and delivery, and team-building.
• You will work with Genesis colleagues to acquire, lead and deliver consulting projects to help our clients unlock and realise value in human development, by helping governments and their partners helping clients understand and help populations to manage risks. You will help resilient health financing arrangements and programmes that are adequately financed, allocate budgets wisely and efficiently, make good use of technologies, and are adaptive and responsive to shocks and opportunities. The result of this will be that marginalised populations will be better able to manage risks and shocks in health, and more broadly across social sectors.

In each project, you will:

• Ensure service excellence and delivery
• Manage interactions and negotiations with clients
• Performance manage the team and team members
• Ensure project profitability and efficiency
• Assess and structure the problem to be solved, and approach to the analysis of data and information, testing and refining hypotheses, and drafting and communicating conclusions and recommendations to the client

In some cases, you will travel to do this, usually with colleagues.

You will also play a role in:

• business development in health financing, including responsibility for leading and managing proposals
• turning new ideas on health financing into concrete products, such as blogposts, academic articles, conference presentations, or innovative products for clients
• practice organisation, including working on practice strategy, business systems, recruiting, nurturing, and managing consultants, and leading and building new specialisms in health financing

We offer you a steep learning curve while providing an opportunity to make a difference. We will invest in your professional development. We offer meaningful work with professional, talented and supportive teams; mentoring and regular feedback from partners; structured training and coaching programmes; and a career ladder.

We hire principals with the expectation that they can become partners at Genesis. Genesis offers a highly rewarding, challenging and flexible career. Working with your mentor, we encourage you to explore living and working in different locations, and deepening and complementing your specialised skills and knowledge in health financing and youth.

The preferred candidate will possess the following essential skills and competencies

• Master’s degree in Economics, Development Studies, Maths, Statistics or similar
• At least ten years’ relevant professional experience in health financing, health systems strengthening or related, with a focus on African health systems
• Ability to work collaboratively with diverse teams in changing environments
• Leadership skills, and the capability to lead teams and projects
• Ability to solve problems through clear thinking, and strong quantitative and qualitative analytical skills, including attention to detail
• Excellent consulting experience, with experience in public consulting in health financing highly desirable
• Experience working in government, with experience working to address health services access, improvement of quality and advancement of equity highly desirable
• Strong communication, writing, and presentation skills in English
• Strong interpersonal skills
• Proficiency in Excel

Other desirable skills and competencies include:

• Proficiency in other advanced software packages, such as STATA, R, Python, data visualisation, presentation or design software, and GIS
• Languages relevant to Genesis’ geographies, especially French