Technical Advisor, Institutional Strengthening & Delivery (Remote - US, UK, Nigeria, Ethiopia, or France)

Institutional Strengthening

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.

Methodology Development

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.

Portfolio and Peer Learning

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.

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.