Technical Advisor, Health Financing

The Clinton Health Access Initiative, Inc. (CHAI) is a global health organization committed to our mission of saving lives and reducing the burden of disease in low-and middle-income countries. We work at the invitation of governments to support them and the private sector to create and sustain high-quality health systems.

CHAI was founded in 2002 in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic with the goal of dramatically reducing the price of life-saving drugs and increasing access to these medicines in the countries with the highest burden of the disease. Over the following two decades, CHAI has expanded its focus. Today, along with HIV, we work in conjunction with our partners to prevent and treat infectious diseases such as COVID-19, malaria, tuberculosis, and hepatitis. Our work has also expanded into cancer, diabetes, hypertension, and other non-communicable diseases, and we work to accelerate the rollout of lifesaving vaccines, reduce maternal and child mortality, combat chronic malnutrition, and increase access to assistive technology as well as mitigating impacts of climate change. We are investing in horizontal approaches to strengthen health systems through programs in human resources for health, digital health, and health financing. With each new and innovative program, our strategy is grounded in maximizing sustainable impact at scale, ensuring that governments lead the solutions, that programs are designed to scale nationally, and learnings are shared globally.

At CHAI, our people are our greatest asset, and none of this work would be possible without their talent, time, dedication and passion for our mission and values. We are a highly diverse team of enthusiastic individuals across 40 countries with a broad range of skillsets and life experiences. CHAI is deeply grounded in the countries we work in, with majority of our staff based in program countries.

CHAI is an Equal Opportunity Employer, and is committed to providing an environment of fairness, and mutual respect where all applicants have access to equal employment opportunities. CHAI values diversity and inclusion and recognizes that our mission is best advanced by the leadership and contributions of people with diverse experience, backgrounds, and culture.

Program overview

The Government of Rwanda strives to achieve Universal Health Coverage (UHC) by enabling equitable access to quality health services for their population as outlined in the Fourth Health Sector Strategic Plan (HSSP IV). This commitment is made against a backdrop of rising health care costs and uncertainty around the future availability of donor funding. While Rwanda is often cited as an example for UHC in Sub-Saharan Africa, in part due to high rates of enrolment in the Mutuelles or Community Based Health Insurance (CBHI) scheme; the challenge will be to sustain these gains. In addition to the social health insurance, other untapped domestic sources of finances such as Private Sector through various forms of partnership as well as Medical Tourism are among the key components of the national health financing strategy. In addition, to mitigate the negative impact of climate change, Government of Rwanda has been executing different strategies and established systems to mobilize more funding from multilateral sources of climate finance including funding mechanisms that promote public-private partnerships to catalyze private sector investment such as Green Climate Fund (GCF) and Global Environment Facility (GEF). Acknowledging this, the Government aims to employ effective, equitable, efficient and sustainable health care financing approaches and inform reforms of existing and new financing mechanisms such as health insurance schemes, Private Sector Engagement and Climate finance.

CHAI Rwanda’s Sustainable Health Financing (SHF) program works on a day-to-day basis with Government leadership in the Ministry of Health (MoH), Rwanda Social Security Board (RSSB)/Ministry of Economy and Finance (MINECOFIN), University of Rwanda, School of Public Health and other government institutions. The goal of our program is to support the Government to sustainably finance health and improve access and quality of health services for all Rwandans. This includes defining priority services for the population; mobilizing, tracking and pooling resources for health; and improving the way those resources are spent to improve quality of care while controlling costs.

Job summary
CHAI currently seeks a Technical Advisor (TA) to support the MOH in the design and implementation of strategic health financing strategy and related health system reforms. Those include ambitious reforms to improve the efficiency and sustainability of the social health insurance (CBHI scheme) through the revision of the CBHI health benefit package, the design and implementation of a national provider payment reform for Primary Health Care (PHC) such as Capitation and Disease Related Grouping (DRG), and mobilize additional resources including innovative financing mechanisms (such as climate finance) as well as improved strategic purchasing of priority PHC services. This secondment position under the department of Planning, Health financing and M&E, offers a unique opportunity to work within MoH and other government institutions, to support initiatives and reforms that lead towards Universal Health Coverage (UHC).

Responsibilities

Specific responsibilities will include the following:

• Policy Advisory: Support the development and/or revision of policy/strategy and provide critical thought partnership to government leadership at MoH, MINECOFIN/RSSB as well as other government institutions and key stakeholders on design and implementation of key health financing strategies and reforms. Current priorities include:o The revision of the CBHI health benefit package and the design, the implementation and adaptations of a payment reform at PHC level, and interventions to improve the management of the CBHI scheme.
o National rollout of new PPM, Capitation based payment mechanism at Health Center and Health Post level.
o Private Sector Engagement (PSE) in health sector, through the development of a strategy for medical tourism and improvement of the Ministry of Health methodology for engagement with private actors.
o Climate financing: explore and design new funding mechanisms for health in health from Climate Finance from existing multilateral sources such as GCF and GEF to mitigate the negative impact of climate change. This includes development of costed Climate-Health and financing strategy and grant application for Rwanda.

• Analytical support: Provide robust analytical support to government partners, to help inform health financing policy decisions, including for the reforms listed above. This include (not limited to):
o Resource mapping and exchange tracking (RMET) to map resource trends from both domestic and external funding and funding gaps against MoH key priorities and to identify pockets of inefficiencies.
o Cost projections for key reforms planned by the government including for the implementation of the capitation reform, ‘4x4’ and Community health work force and for the National Health Sector Strategic Plan (HSSP).
o Cost and impact analyses, including cost effectiveness, cost benefit, and budget impact analyses to inform the revisions of the CBHI health benefit package.
o Execute robust analysis of impacts of climate change on health and develop a policy brief to MoH senior leadership for climate health and financing strategy development
o Conduct cost benefit analysis and economic evaluations of major health reforms to support MoH leadership in the resource mobilization and re-prioritization efforts.
o Develop high-quality written reports and briefs tailored to different target audiences, to turn analytical findings into policy and operational recommendations. This can include policy brief to inform health financing (including climate finance) reforms and support the MoH mobilize and leverage funding for their key priorities from various sources.

• Institutional Capacity Building: Strengthen the institutional and individual capacity at MoH, department of Planning, Health Financing, M&E on relevant health financing and M&E topics through direct capacity building support. This will include:
o Identifying key health financing capacity gaps in and developing strategies to address those together with departmental leadership.
o Study the methods used in the deployment of health financing and public financial management reforms in other countries and advise the government on adapting these lessons to the Rwanda context.
o Exchange knowledge and experience with other CHAI team mets.

• Liaise between CHAI and MOH to explore existing and new technical and financial opportunities within CHAI to support GoR achieve the UHC targets.
• Work closely with other CHAI staffs (flexible TAs as well as seconded staffs) in collaboration to execute tasks related to Sustainable Health Financing. This includes participation of planning, budgeting as well as regular monitoring meetings with other CHAI team members to align CHAI’s support to MoH, RSSB and other key stakeholders accordingly.
• Maintain technical expertise in health financing and stay abreast of key challenges
• Execute other responsibilities as assigned by supervisor.

Qualifications

Qualifications

• Advanced degree in health economics, public health, public policy, or other relevant disciplines preferred;
• A minimum of 10 years of years of experience in a relevant field (e.g. health financing, health economics, financial management) in the public or private sector with increasing responsibilities;
• Experience working in Sub-Saharan Africa and base location in a program country is preferred;
• Affinity for analytics and information management, with strong analytical, problem solving, and quantitative modeling skills;
• Demonstrated experience leading complex projects, from strategy design to implementation, preferably in the public health sector;
• Excellent communication and presentation skills with the ability to write in a clear and concise manner, including for technical documents such as national plans and guidelines;
• Direct experience working with government institutions, informing development of government strategy, policy, and operational plans, preferably in health financing or health system;
• Ability to think strategically, handle ambiguity and work in a very fast-paced, limited-structure, multicultural environment;
• Entrepreneurial mindset, including ability to work independently, self-motivate, and take initiative;
• Ability to learn on the job quickly and absorb and synthesize a broad range of information;
• High level of proficiency in Microsoft Office, particularly Excel, PowerPoint, and Word;

Advantages:

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