Why Leadership & Management?

Well-functioning health systems require teams with strong leadership and management able to put policies and structures in place that allow them to deliver quality care and respond to changing circumstances. Many aspects of delivering care are not clinical but instead are related to data and information, communication, supply chains, logistics, human resources, finance, and governance.

We support teams to achieve their goals more effectively. Our focus on leadership and management skills enables us to partner with teams across a range of programmes in public health - and beyond.

  • Community health programs are critical to strengthening health systems, increasing access to health care, and allowing people to live healthier, more prosperous lives. These programmes often employ large numbers of community health workers, and are the first point of entry into the health system for millions of people. We have partnered with community health teams in Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Togo and Zambia to support them in becoming more effective leaders.

  • Vaccines are among the most cost-effective and impactful public health interventions ever devised. In recent decades, immunisation programmes have brought once common diseases like polio to the brink of eradication. Despite these achievements, immunisation rates have stagnated in many countries: one in five African children do not receive all of the recommended routine vaccines. Leaders of immunisation programmes must manage complex logistical and surveillance operations, while continuously fighting misinformation. We have supported immunisation teams in Malawi, Sierra Leone and Zambia to tackle these and other challenges.

  • Malaria continues to be a major burden on public health, particularly in Africa, where 95% of malaria cases occur. It continues to be the leading cause of death in children under the age of five on the continent. In addition, malaria takes a significant economic toll on both households and governments through treatment and lost economic opportunities. We support teams in Central African Republic, Chad, Mauritania, Namibia and the Republic of Congo as they strive to prevent, control and ultimately eliminate malaria.

  • NCDs contribute to more than two-thirds of all annual deaths worldwide and are among the leading causes of preventable illness and related disability. Over half of those deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries. Addressing NCDs requires a range of strategies to change behavior, to ensure the availability of testing and treatment, and to roll out preventative treatments. Teams responsible for managing NCD programmes therefore need to not only be technically competent, but also excellent planners, problem solvers, project managers and leaders.

Partnerships to date

 
 

 Our approach

Management styles differ across teams, cultures, and individuals. AMP Health aims to provide our partner teams with a broad set of techniques and tools that they can adapt to their own context to improve leadership and management. AMP Health builds custom learning journeys for the teams that we work with structured around a set of core leadership and management competencies. We aim to provide these managers with a toolbox that they can draw from to advance their own goals and objectives. Our support is built around four key elements: 

Embedded support

Dedicated, embedded mentorship & on-the-job learning support.  AMP Management Partners are mid-career professionals with private sector leadership and management experience who work side-by-side with government teams.  

Customised training

We design leadership & management learning journeys for our partner teams based on their unique goals and aptitudes.  Knowing that adults learn best through doing, our practical training is tailored around projects that teams are working on.

Peer

learning

We foster communities of practice within and across the countries that we work in to promote peer learning and support, to share best practices, and to promote the role of leadership and management in development.

Executive coaching

We believe in the power of coaching to make behaviour change stick.  We provide team leads with access to executive coaching to support them on their leadership journeys.

 Impact

“AMP Health’s support has made a big impact on how we see our jobs. Public Health is not only about the technical aspects of health service delivery. It is also about the attitude and behavioral changes that must happen to make a real and lasting impact.”

- Hawanatu Kamara, Ministry of Health and Sanitation, Sierra Leone

We have invested in our monitoring, evaluation and learning framework to understand our impact on our partner teams.

The results show that the teams we work with develop deeper levels of trust. They become better communicators, and put systems and tools in place that allow them to be more effective in achieving their own goals.

They become stronger managers and more confident leaders.

Impact stories

  • The AMP Management Partner identified the quality of concept notes and proposals being prepared by the community health team as a key weakness. As a result, the team was hampered in its ability to attract donors and could not secure sufficient funding to support many of the innovative projects that they had developed.

    The Management Partner worked with the team on proposal development and establishing targets for successful proposals. In addition, AMP Health’s learning team facilitated an in-country training for the team that introduced concepts of human-centered design.

    As a result of this support, the team increased both the quality and quantity of their proposal output. In 2021, more than 30 proposals were completed, and all were funded. According to the team’s Finance Manager, the amount of funding secured doubled year-on-year.

  • As part of Ghana’s grant application to the Global Fund, the Policy, Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation Directorate (PPMED) of the Ghana Health Service needed to develop a proposal for a $16 million health systems strengthening grant. In March 2020, the team nimbly responded to the imposition of lockdown in Accra (following the COVID-19 outbreak in Ghana) by pivoting from the planned in-person proposal development process to a completely online process.

    The AMP Management Partner supported the team to effectively plan and develop the proposal, including transitioning to online collaboration and productivity tools during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Task teams were each responsible for developing different components of the proposal, and more than 60 stakeholders (representing government agencies, funders, and civil society) were identified and consulted at the different stages of the process.

    Working together in new ways challenged the team to draw on a range of leadership and management skills including change management, resilience, stakeholder engagement, teamwork, influencing, and negotiation.

    Following a stringent review and negotiation process, the Global Fund approved the proposal. This will unlock crucial new resources to strengthen Ghana’s health system through improved supply chain management, health management information systems, public financial management, human resources, integrated service delivery, and laboratory systems.

  • In an effort to reduce the incidence of cervical cancer, the Malawi Expanded Programme on Immunizations (EPI) team was tasked with introducing the HPV vaccine. The AMP Management Partner supported the team to:

    • Apply effective communication techniques with busy stakeholders

    • Engage in difficult conversations with various stakeholders to ensure strategic alignment

    • Create and adhere to a timeline of milestones

    • Prioritize using tools like the urgent/important matrix

    As a result of better L&M skills applied to the focus workstream, the Malawi EPI team has:

    • Transitioned to having more productive in-person meetings with potential funders instead of relying on emails

    • Improved internal coordination and delegation, resulting in improved teamwork and load-balancing among team members.

    • Used lessons from previous vaccine introductions to prioritize activities and minimize disruptions to new vaccine introductions, thus streamlining the HPV vaccine introduction.

    Ultimately, the team successfully vaccinated 9- and 10-year-old girls with both the 1st and 2nd doses of the HPV vaccine and conducted a post-introduction evaluation. Most activities were conducted on time and as planned, including monthly task force meetings where activity implementation was tracked. Because of better planning and management, additional funding was secured to expand vaccine coverage.

  • After the placement of the Management Partner in the Zambia Community Health Unit (CHU), one of the team’s key priorities was to review their National Community Health Strategy. This document had originally been developed by an external consultant and turned out to be impractical. It lacked a detailed activity plan, was not costed, and contradicted other strategy documents. The MP assisted the team to re-imagine and redevelop this strategy by:

    • Analyzing key strategy documents: The MP facilitated an exercise in which the team mapped the different strategies and objectives for community health set out in other key documents. This included developing a visual map to illustrate the overlaps and key differences between these guiding documents.

    • Developing a framework: The MP worked with the team to develop a framework for reviewing the community health strategy, drawing on the WHO’s health systems building blocks approach.

    • Refining the strategy: The MP worked with the CHU team to develop and execute a clearly thought-out process for reviewing and refining the community health strategy. This process included extensive consultation with Ministry of Health stakeholders as well as donors and implementing partners.

    • Exploring values and guiding principles: The MP facilitated a session in which the team developed and agreed to adhere to a set of values and guiding principles.

    • Developing a one-page summary strategy: The MP supported the team to conceptualize a summary reference document for partners and community health stakeholders.

    The revised National Community Health Strategy was approved by the Minister of Health and praised by partners for its clarity of purpose.

  • After developing Malawi’s first ever National Community Health Strategy, the Community Health Services Section needed to ensure that the strategy was distributed to district officials who would be instrumental in successfully implementing it. However, the team did not have the resources to undertake a national-level dissemination.

    The team approached the Ministry of Local Government to propose a more collaborative approach to disseminating the strategy. The team successfully negotiated a partnership where the Ministry of Health would work together with the Ministry of Local government to distribute both the National Community Health Strategy and the recently launched Health Sector Strategic Plan.

    The Community Health Services Section was then able to secure funding from USAID to support the dissemination of both strategic documents. Emphasising the value for money to the funder of distributing both documents at once was key to unlocking this source of funding.

    This funding supported the distribution of the strategy to 16 district councils. During dissemination, over 800 diverse stakeholders across the districts were sensitized on the elements of the new strategy. The dissemination events provided an interactive forum for stakeholders to have a common understanding of the strategy and an opportunity for each district to develop an NCHS implementation work plan to incorporate into their District Implementation Plans. The success of this dissemination allowed the team to mobilise funding from other sources for the remaining districts.

    This project required the Community Health Services Section team to manage multiple, complex tasks and play a leadership role for a diverse group of stakeholders.