Maisha Meds

Loyalty Supply Associate Director

 

Maisha Meds is hiring! We’re looking for an associate director to work within our loyalty programme. 

About Maisha Meds

Maisha Meds is an organization dedicated to improving health care in Africa. We began full-time operations in 2017 and over the past few years has grown to support over 4million patient encounters at over 1,000 pharmacies and drug shops annually across Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Nigeria, and Zambia.  We are building the financial and technology infrastructure to enable global health funders to pay for health outcomes at the last mile, with an initial focus on malaria case management, with results from a randomized controlled trial with UC Berkeley showing that our programs lead to a statistically significant 350% increase in appropriate and high quality malaria care.  Based on these results, we are planning to scale the technology to reach over 10,000 health facilities and 20million patients, and to directly pay for health outcomes for 1 million patients annually by 2024.   In addition, we are actively building programs to support injectable contraceptives, HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis, measles and HPV vaccines, malnutrition support, and safe water interventions.

Our work is funded by USAID Development Innovation Ventures, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada, Pfizer, and others, and we are starting to build partnerships with multilateral global health funders, pharmaceutical companies, and national health insurance funds to have them pay us on a contract basis for health outcomes.  We use data from our point of sale software to design programs that leverage financial incentives to improve uptake of high impact health products.  And we measure our success by our ability to improve the quality and affordability of healthcare diagnosis, treatment, and prevention for low-income patients across Africa.

About the role

As part of the next generation of its Loyalty programs, Maisha Meds is transitioning away from its consignment-based supply chain model. We’re looking for an experienced supply chain leader eager to lead cross-functional efforts to transition our 200+ loyalty facilities to a cash/credit based inventory management process. This leader will also lead our lean warehouse and logistics team in this new model. 

This role will be under the loyalty program, whose primary objective is to support the provision of high quality, affordable care to patients through incentivising provision of commodities. In order to control quality and availability of products used under the loyalty programme, we facilitate the supply chain process to partner facilities. 

During the period the loyalty program has been in operation, our legacy supply chain model has been providing these products on a consignment basis, where the partner facilities do not pay for the products. This has called for a heavy effort investment in a monthly stock taking process. Despite having controls in the process, we have been experiencing a lot of stock losses at these facilities, with minimal success in recovery. This has introduced a sustainability risk to our programs, and hence the call to transition to a cash/credit model.  We are looking for an enthusiastic and diligent team member who would join the loyalty program operations team with a key focus on leading this transition.  An ideal candidate has experience in supply chain, inventory and loss control management in the retail space across multiple facilities. This candidate enjoys a fast-paced working environment, loves working with and interacting with customers, and re-iterating processes and systems to improve the customer experience. This candidate will effectively put up systems, processes and controls to mitigate fraud and stock loss risks.

Our preference would be to have you based in Kisumu, but also open to a Nairobi-based role, with frequent travel, for the right candidate.  We’re a small, friendly team that values open communication and mentorship, and we provide benefits including health insurance and pension

Responsibilities

• Reviewing our recently redesigned supply chain process (down payment model), suggesting further refinements where necessary and leading scale to our partner facilities. Phase 1 will be to transition Uganda facilities to the new model and phase 2 will involve transitioning the Kenya facilities
• Supporting the Director of Programs in scaling Uganda operations to match the size of Kenya operations supported by the new supply chain model
• Responsible for fine tuning the sub-processes supporting the new model. Such include but not limited to supporting finance processes (cash collateral management), facility onboarding process, facility off boarding process (collateral reconciliation and payout) etc.
• Working closely with the product management team to design and conduct quality assurance of automation tools to support the new model
  • Automation of new real time collateral management
  • Designing reporting dashboards that support new real time monitoring of KPIs
• Champion relationship with our third party warehousing and distribution partner as we transition to an fully outsourced products distribution process
  • Review our current orders fulfillment process to improve on case fill KPI
• Overall supply chain management; from making bulk orders from suppliers to dispatching to facilities
• Design processes and invest in industry relationships that will keep them informed on changing dynamics around products
  • This will help inform loyalty leadership on any requirement to shift between brands
  • Market intelligence to help the team prepare for any envisaged national stockouts 
• Support future supply chain pilots for continuous process refinement
• Responsible for accuracy of supply chain data

Qualifications

1. Degree in Supply Chain or other related field 
2. 5+ years working in supply chain and inventory management in retail, pharmaceuticals or other similar applicable sectors. Candidates with deep on ground consultancy experience in this field will be considered
3. Background in public health will be an added advantage
4. Experience in data analysis for huge volumes of data
5. Out of the box thinking (Our operations have critical nuances and therefore traditional supply chain process will not fit the foot)
6. Humility, empathy, and a sense of humor. We are a small team that cares deeply about our work, and it is essential that we work well together
7. Innovation in crafting world class solutions
8. Growth mindset and enthusiasm for learning, feedback and continuous improvement
9. Ability to roll up one’s sleeves and directly move projects forward

Why You Should Join Us

• On a roll: Doubling year over year with new funding partnerships soon to be announced and recent expansion into Uganda, Nigeria, and Ethiopia
• Great team: Founded, managed and backed by successful veterans of Stanford School of Medicine, Google, Lions Head Investment Bank,, I&M Bank.  We have technologists, clinicians, and economists working side by side to solve difficult problems.
• Great funders: We’re backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID Development Innovation Ventures, CIFF, WHO FIND, and Pfizer to pay for healthcare on behalf of patients, with others to be announced soon.
• Huge market: Disrupting a massive, growing $50+ billion market for healthcare payments for low-income patients, with a focus on paying for health outcomes to ensure patients get better.
• Great customers: Create incentives that ensure our nurses, pharmacists, and clinicians provide excellent care and pay them when this happens.
• Impact: A fun and exciting start-up culture that empowers its people to make a huge impact.

Start date is ASAP, and compensation is commensurate with experience.