Last week, a new initiative to eliminate malaria from Central America was announced by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Carlos Slim Foundation. The countries of the region have already made impressive progress towards this goal, reducing case incidence from 125,000 in 2000 to only around 10,000 last year. Obstacles remain, but this new mechanism should take care of the financial gaps in national budgets and allow countries to focus on the remaining technical and operational challenges.
The team at CHAI provides operational support to the governmental malaria programs in the region to help improve their effectiveness and build systems that are strong enough to support the goal of sustainable elimination by 2020. Under this new financing mechanism, and in close partnership with the Pan American Health Organization, CHAI is looking to expand to provide additional manpower to work on a day-to-day basis with provincial malaria programs in some of the remaining endemic regions, such as the sugarcane producing region of Escuintla in Guatemala, the remote border region between Honduras and Nicaragua, and the indigenous Caribbean communities of Panama.
They are searching for hard-working folks with impressive problem-solving abilities and the skills to help national and provincial programs with challenges such as enhancing disease surveillance systems, building better health information platforms, strengthening supply chains, conducting rigorous data analysis, mapping malaria, planning and managing effective vector control campaigns, and/or monitoring and evaluating programs.
Candidates should be willing to relocate to or live in Central America, and Spanish ability will thus be important (although fluency is not necessarily required).
If you think you might be a good fit, apply directly at https://clintonhealthaccess.org/jobs/.