Senior Communications Officer

Organization: Program for Appropriate Technology in Health
Country: Kenya
Closing date: 23 Oct 2015

PATH is an international organization that drives transformative innovation to save lives and improve health, especially among women and children. We accelerate innovation across five platforms—vaccines, drugs, diagnostics, devices, and system and service innovations—that harness our entrepreneurial insight, scientific and public health expertise, and passion for health equity. By mobilizing partners around the world, we take innovation to scale, working alongside countries primarily in Africa and Asia to tackle their greatest health needs. Together, we deliver measurable results that disrupt the cycle of poor health.

The PATH Vaccine Access and Delivery Program is working to close the gaps in access to lifesaving vaccines. Our mission is to save lives and promote well-being through innovations that ensure equitable access, sustainable delivery, and optimal performance of vaccines. We are collaborating with the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative (MVI) to support countries to establish their decision-making processes about a malaria vaccine that is under review by the World Health Organization. We are hiring a senior communications officer to manage a strategy to meet the information needs of countries considering possible vaccine use as part of their malaria control and prevention efforts.

We seek to recruit a Senior Communications Officer who will be responsible for managing PATH's communications on malaria vaccine (ppRTS,S) for country audiences as a member of the RTS,S project team.

Specific Duties and Responsibilities:

Work closely with the ppRTS,S country team to help shape objectives and activities.
Develop communications approaches to support policy and access objectives, including identifying communications needs/gaps and how to address them.
Identify and engage new allies and influencers.
Create communications tools and resources for use by country partners, allies, and influencers.
Identify and implement other tactics to strengthen awareness of and interest in the role of a malaria vaccine in a country’s overall malaria strategy.
Identify key opportunities for additional outreach on the malaria vaccine; coordinate PATH engagement.
Coordinate with other ppRTS,S Communications staff and country team on message development, adapting as necessary for in-country audiences; maintain message map for use in all presentations and materials.
Provide input on reframing of scientific results, other research, and project milestones for policy audiences.
Develop and manage materials needed for RTS,S outreach, including presentations, talking points, online resources.
Ensure coordination with other PATH vaccine and malaria efforts in target countries; recommend approaches to leverage and coordinate other vaccine and malaria efforts.
Coordinate with those conducting global communications for the malaria vaccine.
Serve as needed on coordinating committees with partners.
Required Skills
Demonstrated ability to design and implement communications strategies on health or development issues in low-resource countries.
Proven ability to communicate complex scientific and economic information to different stakeholders.
Team-focused with the ability to interact with diverse colleagues, and facilitate strong working relationships between partners; adept at working closely with others over geographical distance.
Diplomacy in communicating with a broad and diverse audience.
Excellent written and oral communication skills in English and French.
Experience on malaria preferred; experience with vaccine and immunization issues a plus.
Ability to travel up to 25% time annually. Required Experience A degree in communications, international relations, or a related field with a minimum of 10 years of experience in international/global health communications, proven experience working at the country level on health or development communications, experience in Sub-Saharan Africa preferred, experience identifying and working with key opinion leaders.