Senior Program Officer, Southern Africa

**The Foundation**

We are the largest nonprofit fighting poverty, disease, and inequity around the world. Founded on a simple premise: people everywhere, regardless of identity or circumstances, should have the chance to live healthy, productive lives. We believe our employees should reflect the rich diversity of the global populations we aim to serve. We provide an exceptional benefits package to employees and their families which include comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with no premiums, generous paid time off, paid family leave, foundation-paid retirement contribution, regional holidays, and opportunities to engage in several employee communities. As a workplace, we’re committed to creating an environment for you to thrive both personally and professionally.

**The Team**

The Global Development Division (GD) focuses on improving the delivery of high-impact health products and services to the world’s poorest communities and helps countries expand access to health by strengthening systems that support improvements in all health outcomes with a focus on those services needed to allow children and mothers to survive and thrive. Global Development includes the following Program Strategy Teams (PSTs): Primary Healthcare (PHC), Immunization, Polio, Emergency Response, Global Health Agencies and Funds, India Country Office, Nigeria Country Office, Ethiopia Country Office and Africa Regional Office Teams. The regional teams lead work across the health and economic opportunity spaces. The GD organization programs nearly $2B in grant funding per year and has approximately 300 staff, half of whom are based in the regional offices in Africa and India.

The focus of the Africa team is to enable collective impact for the foundation in Africa by influencing policy and finance towards key development priorities, strengthening capacity and enabling systems for delivery, and innovating and influencing cross-cutting enablers for impact at scale. The Senior Program Officer (SPO), Southern Africa will support the Regional Representative, Southern Africa (RRSA), when working with foundation teams in the management of their investment portfolio in Southern Africa, and work with external partners to drive progress. As part of this responsibility, this role will help to drive relationships with country officials, grantees, contractors and key partners to achieve the foundation's desired impact, provide project briefings and updates to foundation leadership.

The postholder will be based in Johannesburg, South Africa, and will report to the RRSA.

**Your Role**

We seek an experienced professional to serve as a SPO for Southern Africa. The post holder will work with internal foundation teams and leverage an ecosystem of partners at country, regional and global levels, at the direction of the RRSA, to support the continent-wide spread and scale of the foundation’s programmatic priorities, with a focus on the Southern Africa region.

Working closely with the RRSA, you will support the strategic direction of the team and oversee the grant management function within the team. You will work with internal teams and leverage an ecosystem of partners at country and regional levels, to support the identification of priorities, unique investments, potential for the foundation, prototyping of interventions and supporting the scale up of programmatic priorities, with a focus on the Southern Africa region.

**What You'll Do**
- External Responsibilities:_
- Support the RRSA, with strategic information, opportunity and risk identification, portfolio management and collaborative representation at internal/external fora.
- At the guidance of the RRSA, establish and strengthen critical relationships with national and regional governments in the Southern Africa region, and other key foundation partners, including funders, media, NGOs, multilateral organizations, and the private sector to boost political will and help bring in new resources to meet our priority objectives.
- Support and advocate for foundation priority strategies in the Southern Africa region: Angola, Botswana, Comoros, Eswatini, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Your priority countries are South Africa, Mozambique, and Malawi.
- Create and maintain high quality, productive, collaborative, and coordinated interactions and clear and consistent communications with grantees and partners in the region.
- Support the development of a robust regional internal and external communications plan. Develop the weekly and monthly regional reports as a key communication tool to engage PSTs.
- Internal Responsibilities:_
- Gather and provide colleagues with information at country and regional level about priority issues and strategies that are important to the foundation, such as new policies, local investments, financial regulation, biotechnology, gender, and other key health and development prior