About the Role
The Maternal Neonatal Child Health (MNCH) Technical Advisor will provide technical guidance for a multi-country, multi-million-dollar project implemented in Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Senegal, and Ghana. The project aims to accelerate the uptake and use of lifesaving tools for the prevention, diagnosis, and management of pre-eclampsia and maternal anaemia, major contributors to maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality in low-resource settings.
The role will provide technical expertise across maternal and newborn health, including project intervention design, implementation research, quality of care frameworks, and quality assurance mechanisms. The Advisor will ensure that MNCH clinical models of care and technical clinical considerations are embedded into the design, adaptation, implementation, and evaluation of models of care across project countries.
The MNCH Technical Advisor will work closely with the Programme Manager, MERL Manager, Consortium partners, country teams, and Unitaid.
Primary Responsibilities
Technical Leadership
- Provide technical expertise and guidance on maternal and newborn health, including global and consortium standards, protocols, evidence-based approaches, and best practices.
- Guide the design and implementation of person-centred MNCH service delivery models for pre-eclampsia and maternal anaemia.
- Provide technical input on products and services targeting pre-eclampsia and maternal anaemia, including diagnostics and treatment pathways.
- Support innovative service delivery models, including Group ANC, midwifery-led care, networks of care, and referral pathways.
- Ensure MNCH clinical models of care and technical clinical considerations are embedded in project design, adaptation, implementation, and evaluation across countries.
- Support country teams to translate global and national MNCH clinical guidance into feasible, context-specific service delivery models.
- Provide technical guidance to ensure implementation research activities are grounded in MNCH clinical best practices, including ANC pathways, referral systems, diagnosis, treatment, follow-up, respectful maternity care, and continuity of care.
- Work with country teams to design, adapt, implement, and refine MNCH clinical models of care for pre-eclampsia and maternal anaemia, ensuring clear clinical pathways, provider roles, quality standards, and patient-centred care principles.
- Design quality of care frameworks and support quality assurance mechanisms across project countries.
- Provide technical assistance on health system requirements, workforce needs, facility readiness, and service delivery arrangements required to deliver MNCH products and services effectively.
- Provide MNCH technical input into implementation research protocols, tools, learning questions, data collection approaches, interpretation of findings, and intervention adaptation.
- Work with the MERL Manager to strengthen MNCH indicators, quality-of-care measures, and implementation outcomes, ensuring alignment with global frameworks such as EWENE metrics.
- Support community demand generation and engagement in MNCH services, ensuring linkages with quality service delivery and referral systems.
- Identify MNCH implementation bottlenecks, clinical quality gaps, and health system constraints, and support country teams to use data for learning, course correction, and quality improvement.
- Ensure alignment with country and global MNCH agendas, national guidelines, clinical standards, and best practices.
- Review and provide technical input into workplans, reports, and project deliverables.
Country and Relationship Management
- Provide hands-on MNCH technical support to multi-country teams, ensuring consistency of core clinical standards while allowing country-level adaptation.
- Support country teams to align implementation with national guidelines, health system capacity, and service delivery realities.
- Drive the programme’s learning agenda, including documentation of promising practices, implementation lessons, and scalable MNCH models of care.
- Provide oversight to country workplans and project documents to ensure timeliness, technical quality, and alignment with deliverables.
- Manage generation and dissemination of technical information to staff, partners, and stakeholders.
- Facilitate cross-country learning on MNCH service delivery, clinical quality improvement, referral systems, community engagement, and implementation research findings.
- Support collaboration with Consortium partners to ensure coordinated technical approaches and shared learning.
- Serve as an MNCH technical spokesperson for the project in donor meetings, technical forums, and partner engagements.
Stakeholder Engagement and Thought Leadership
- Participate in and/or lead programme governance structures, including the Steering Committee and Programme Implementation Team.
- Support regional and global stakeholder engagement and advocacy activities, including opportunities for collaboration, visibility, and uptake of project learning.
- Contribute to project knowledge products, technical briefs, learning papers, presentations, and thought leadership on MNCH models of care, implementation research, and scale-up.
- Engage with government, professional associations, technical working groups, donors, and implementing partners to align with national MNCH priorities and global best practices.
Program Development
- Participate in concept development and writing of quarterly and annual reports for internal and external stakeholders, including donors.
- Contribute MNCH technical content to proposals, concept notes, workplans, donor reports, and programme development materials.
- Support identification of emerging MNCH priorities, evidence gaps, and opportunities for innovation, scale-up, and sustainability.
Requirements and Qualifications
Education and Experience
- Bachelor’s degree in a clinical or health-related field, such as Medicine, Nursing, Midwifery, Public Health, or a related discipline.
- Master’s degree in Public Health, Maternal and Child Health, Health Systems, Epidemiology, Implementation Science, or a related field is highly advantageous.
- 5–10+ years of professional experience in MNCH, maternal and newborn health, or related public health programming.
- Demonstrated experience designing and implementing MNCH research or implementation research programmes, preferably in LMIC settings.
- Proven experience providing technical leadership and quality improvement support within decentralised, multi-country, or multi-site programme structures.
- Experience designing, assessing, or strengthening MNCH clinical pathways and models of care across health system levels.
- Experience working with government health systems, research and procurement authorities, health facilities, professional bodies, and implementing partners.
- Experience supporting multi-country MNCH interventions, including adaptation of technical guidance across diverse policy, service delivery, and health workforce contexts.
Knowledge and Skills
- Deep technical knowledge of evidence-based MNCH clinical and public health practices, including antenatal care, skilled delivery, respectful maternity care, emergency obstetric and newborn care, postnatal care, newborn care, and immunization.
- Strong understanding of pre-eclampsia and maternal anaemia prevention, screening, diagnosis, management, referral, and follow-up within routine MNCH service delivery platforms.
- Ability to design and review protocols, guidelines, tools, SOPs, job aids, clinical pathways, and quality improvement approaches.
- Strong understanding of implementation research methods and ability to apply MNCH clinical expertise to real-world programme learning, adaptation, and scale-up.
- Experience with data interpretation, programme monitoring and evaluation, quality improvement, and adaptive implementation.
- Strong strategic thinking and ability to translate evidence and policy into practical, scalable MNCH solutions.
- Strong stakeholder engagement skills with government, donors, technical agencies, professional associations, and implementing partners.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including technical reporting, facilitation, and presentations.
- Fluency in written and spoken English is required; knowledge of French is an advantage.
