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 Africa team works to enable the foundation’s ambitious goals of scaling evidence-based interventions that target a range of diseases and socio-economic conditions which are endemic across Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The team implements its responsibility through direct country engagement to deploy interventions and delivery models, and by building the partner architecture to replicate successful interventions and models across multiple countries.


Your Role
We seek an experienced professional to act as the foundation’s Deputy Director, West & Central Africa. This role will be responsible for working with internal foundation teams and leveraging an ecosystem of partners at the country, regional and global levels to support the continent-wide spread and scale of the foundation’s programmatic priorities, with a focus on the West & Central Africa regions (excluding Nigeria where we have a country office). The focus of the Africa team is to enable collective impact for the foundation in Africa by shaping policy and finance towards key development priorities, strengthening capacity and enabling systems for delivery, and innovating and leveraging crosscutting enablers for impact at scale.

The postholder will guide foundation teams in the management of their investment portfolio in those sub-regions, and work with external partners to drive progress. As part of this responsibility, this role will manage 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 role will be based in Dakar, Senegal, and report to the Director, Africa.


What You’ll Do
The selected candidate will be responsible for the following tasks:
Advocacy and Policy
• Support and advocate for priority strategies of the foundation in the West & Central Africa region, consisting of all countries in those sub-regions excluding Nigeria.
• Gather and provide colleagues with information at the country and regional level about priority issues and strategies that are important to the foundation, such as new policies, local investments, financial regulation, biotechnology, and other key health and development priorities.

Government & Partner Relations
• Establish and strengthen critical relationships with national and regional governments in the West 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.
• Create and maintain high quality, productive, collaborative and coordinated interactions and clear and consistent communications with grantees and partners in the region.
• Support foundation leadership trips, learning, engagement opportunities, and other appropriate activities to foundation staff visiting East Africa.
• Attend meetings to represent the foundation and advocate / help shape global, regional and country agendas in line with foundation priorities.

Investment Management
• Support the coordination of programmatic work in the region, in close partnership with foundation’s Program Strategy and Functional Teams.
• Provide internal review of program and or functional team grants/investments, contributing expert knowledge of local context in shaping said grants/investments. Source, develop, and manage one’s own portfolio of grants/investments.
People Management & Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)
• Ensure strong people and organisational management through hiring the talent needed to achieve our goals, ensuring successful employee onboarding, communicating performance expectations, creating goal alignment, supporting change management, giving, and seeking feedback, providing coaching, measuring progress and holding people accountable, supporting employee development, and recognizing achievement and lessons learned.
• Ensure that the foundation’s DEI framework, as well as its gender integration approach, are applied to the West & Central Africa portfolio with the purpose of enhancing impact.
Other duties as assigned.


Your Experience
• Advanced degree Master’s/MBA/PhD in a relevant field, such as international development, economics, business administration, management, or relevant social sciences.
• Minimum of 15 years of professional experience desired, with at least 10 years in a program management capacity, preferably leading projects in an international or regional organization with increasing levels of complexity.
• Regional experience: demonstrated experience living and working in West and Central Africa, with a deep understanding of the regional context and challenges.
• Bilingual proficiency: ability to proficiently write and communicate in both French and English, ensuring effective collaboration and communication across diverse teams and stakeholders.
• Experience in foundation programmatic areas: Proven experience in one of the foundation’s key programmatic areas such as health, gender, education, financial inclusion, or agriculture.
• Recognized internally and externally by the development community in West & Central Africa and/or other regions in Sub-Saharan Africa.
• Proven experience developing collaborative relationships and effectively engaging with a wide array of stakeholders at the country and regional levels including but not limited to government, regional entities, influencers, donors and partners/grantees on a wide range of issues. Ability to adapt and learn from local contexts and serve as a trusted advisor to stakeholders.
• Experience facilitating all aspects of leadership trips to countries in the region, including development of strategic meeting priorities, briefing and follow-up.
• Ability to convene, lead and influence others to align to shared strategy goals, in a constructive manner, ensuring strong implementation, measurement and course-correction. Proven experience managing conflicts and building consensus.
• Outstanding interpersonal skills and humility; ability to listen and absorb perspectives from stakeholders and synthesize into thoughtful and well-designed comprehensive grants.
• Good knowledge of complex program design that involves working with multiple stakeholders including technical experts, government and partners, to 1) conceive and co-develop grant ideas/concepts that offer effective and implementable solutions to complex development problems, and 2) provide on-the-ground oversight of grant development and implementation activities.
• Ability to prioritize among competing priorities, to focus and achieve results.
• Excellent oral, facilitation and written communication skills, able to effectively synthesize information to reach diverse audiences and build consensus.
• Ability to be self-guided and work effectively and comfortably with sensitivity across barriers such as language, culture and distance.
• Demonstrated ability to function successfully in a politically demanding environment. Experience working in a matrix environment strongly preferred.
• Excellent organizational skills and proven experience managing coordination mechanisms designed to lead teams through a complex and ambiguous task.
• A sense of humor.


Other Attributes
• Comfortable in a wide range of cultural, geographic and operational situations, demonstrating culturally sensitive behaviour with a diverse range of people and a deep commitment to development issues and high standards of personal integrity.
• Ability to travel up to 30% domestically and internationally.