Director, Global Program Advocacy and Communications, Health

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 mission of the Global Policy & Advocacy (GPA) division is to understand and shape the public policy debates affecting the foundation's work, build support for its major program and policy objectives, and develop partnerships and alliances that can advance the foundation's objectives nationally and globally. Because the foundation's resources alone are not enough to solve the challenges ahead, GPA also supports advocacy efforts to engage diverse collaborators and promote innovative solutions that advance our program goals. We work in close partnership with grantees, our colleagues in the Global Health, Global Development, Global Growth & Opportunity, U.S. and Gender Equality programs and Communications to build the environment in which all people have the opportunity to lead healthy and productive lives.

Global Program Advocacy & Communications (GPAC) is the Foundation’s global capability for issue advocacy and communications. GPAC engages where work is cross-market, technically complex, and requires global assets and specialized expertise. Working with our program, regional, and country teams, we help mobilize the financing, policy change, and public legitimacy required for impact. GPAC’s core functions include:

GPAC partners with Foundation colleagues and external stakeholders—including governments, multilateral institutions, civil society, philanthropy, the media, and others—to ensure that global strategies strengthen country-led advocacy and drive measurable progress.

Your Role The global health sector is being redefined. Development assistance for health has decreased significantly since its peak in 2021, major health multilaterals had difficulty meeting replenishment targets, and bilateral donors are shifting their funding approaches. At the same time, governments in Africa and Asia are raising domestic health spending and asserting leadership through the Lusaka Agenda, the Accra Reset, Africa CDC, AUDA NEPAD, the African Medicines Agency, and India’s growing role as a source of vaccines, digital public infrastructure and AI for other countries. AI is moving from pilots into public health systems. The Foundation has committed to spend its resources by 2045 to help ensure no mother, child or baby dies of a preventable cause, the next generation grows up in a world without deadly infectious diseases, and hundreds of millions of people break free from poverty.

The Director, Global Program Advocacy and Communications (Global PAC), Health leads the Foundation’s global health advocacy through this transition. The Director provides strategic leadership for the team that turns the Foundation’s health priorities into political will, financing and policy change, and helps build a system of health financing and policy that countries own and that will last beyond any single donor, including the Foundation.

The Director leads Global PAC Health, including the Program Partner teams aligned to the Global Health, Global Development and Gender Equality divisions, and Health Communications. The team’s centralized capabilities drive global outcomes and create the narratives, global public goods, evidence, and specialized policy capacity that make market- and country-led advocacy more effective. This includes building investment cases with program and finance and resource mobilization teams, building partner coalitions, crafting issue narratives and spotting risks, and strengthening the policy and regulatory environments needed to advance our health financing and policy goals. The team’s work supports the Foundation’s goals and the GPA division priorities that advance them: Maternal & Child Survival, Health Research and Development (R&D), Innovation Introduction, and Health Financing.

The Director works across the Foundation with the program strategy teams (PSTs) and division leadership teams, and across GPA with the market-led teams in Europe, Middle East and East Asia (EMEEA), North America (NAT), Africa, India and South/Southeast Asia, the Development Policy and Finance (DPAF) team, and the philanthropic partnership team (PPT), so that Foundation priorities reach decision-makers through strategic, coordinated advocacy. The Director leads the team that serves as GPA’s front door to the PSTs and division leadership and aligns GPA’s advocacy capabilities behind the Foundation’s highest-impact priorities.

Global and country teams each hold something the other needs. Seattle sits close to PSTs, government relations teams in donor capital are close to financing decisions, and regional and country teams hold the context, and the relationship with governments in our delivery geographies The Director makes the partnership model between global and regional/country teams work: co-designing strategy with Africa and India colleagues from the outset, sharing intelligence in both directions, advocating inside the Foundation for country priorities with PSTs and division leaders, and leading GPAC Health on the connections and priorities a global team is best placed to do.

The ideal leader understands and translates complex PST strategies and brings the best of GPA to them: its relationships, intelligence, financing expertise and communications capability. They have deep advocacy experience, strong knowledge of financing sources across bilateral, multilateral and philanthropic funders and the ability to work with the Resource Mobilization (RM) Hub and other GPA teams to maximize resource mobilization. They understand how health systems are financed and run, how ministries of finance and health make budget decisions, and how to effect policy change at global, regional and national levels. They have earned credibility with leaders in governments and institutions across the Global South. They are both a practitioner and an orchestrator: credible enough to speak in specifics on advocacy tactics, strategy and partners, and skilled at keeping many complex, interdependent efforts moving at once. They are decisive, with the credibility to define clearly what is and is not achievable and to bring colleagues with them. This role suits a leader who has worked in multiple parts of global health, in or with government, in multilateral, academic or research institutions, in civil society, or in industry.

This role partners with the Director, Global PAC Global Growth and Opportunity (GGO) to co-lead the overall Global PAC team and reports to the President, GPA.

*Applications accepted until Friday, November 27th. Locations considered for this role are Seattle, WA, Washington, DC and London, UK. As a global search for the best talent, all qualified senior leaders are encouraged to apply.

What You'll Do

Strategy and leadership

Partnership with regional and country teams

Financing, architecture and ecosystems