Deadline: 19th December 2025
The Health Innovation Exchange (HIEx) was born inside the UN innovation ecosystem, originally anchored within UNAIDS. We carry that legitimacy forward with credibility, neutrality, and the ability to convene across borders. Our mandate is to work with innovators, investors, governments, corporates, and ecosystem partners to ensure that promising health innovations scale and become integrated into health systems.
One of our flagship initiatives is the Reckitt Catalyst programme, a multi-country effort supporting high-potential health innovators (particularly women-led ventures) across Africa, Asia, and Latin America as they navigate scale, partnerships, and investment readiness. While you’ll spend meaningful time contributing to this programme, our work extends beyond it and continues to evolve, giving you space to grow into new areas as our strategy expands.
We care deeply about women-led innovation because women make up the majority of the health workforce globally, yet receive a fraction of available funding. Everything we do connects back to building equity, resilience, and better health outcomes.
The Role
The Program Associate will work closely with our Portfolio & Investment Senior Manager to keep our programmes running smoothly, make sure partners stay aligned, and ensure founders feel supported.
The role is designed for someone who enjoys structure but also thrives in ambiguity. You will be a great fit if you are someone who can switch between sending high-quality outreach emails, coordinating logistics, spotting early warning signals in a startup’s progress, and helping us think through smarter ways to run the next cycle of a program.
You will work with founders, mentors, experts, government partners, and investors, but with the right amount of support and guidance. You grow as the programme grows.
Key Responsibilities
- Venture Sourcing & Ecosystem Support: You will help us find outstanding founders, often women-led, tech-enabled, and solving meaningful health challenges. This includes scanning the ecosystem, drafting outreach messages, supporting due diligence preparation, and helping us keep a clean pipeline of high-potential innovators.
- Programme Implementation & Cohort Support: Much of our work involves running multi-country programmes with many moving parts. You’ll help coordinate logistics, plan activities, manage calendars and communication, ensure participants get timely information, and surface any issues that might affect delivery. You’ll also support with mentor/expert matching, workshop preparation, and follow-ups.
- Stakeholder Coordination: Because we work across government, private sector, investors, and global partners, part of your role is helping keep everyone aligned. You’ll support with drafting briefs, scheduling key meetings, drawing insights from meetings, and ensuring actions flow smoothly between partners.
- Operational Problem-Solving: Programs evolve and not everything goes according to plan. We value people who can notice small operational issues before they become big ones, propose simple solutions, and help us iterate. You don’t need to have the answers- just the instinct to ask good questions, look for patterns, and bring options forward.
- Data & Reporting Support: You’ll help gather and maintain clean data on startups, events, sessions, and outcomes. You’ll assist in preparing progress updates, financial/business reports, impact summaries, and programme documentation guided by our data management and reporting frameworks.
- Design & Visibility Materials: You’ll support the creation of clean, visually coherent assets that enhance programme visibility. This will range from presentation decks, session visuals, event materials, founder-facing one-pagers, and simple social or communication assets. Good design instincts and comfort using tools like Canva or Figma will be a huge plus.
What We Offer
You will enter a rich learning environment where global health systems, entrepreneurship, and policy intersect. You’ll work on real problems across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, learning how innovators think, how governments make decisions, and how investors evaluate opportunities. You’ll be part of a values-driven organisation that genuinely believes in equity, inclusion, and shifting power toward communities and innovators.
We are patient about systems change but not slow in execution. You will have room to try new approaches, propose improvements, and shape how we do things, especially when your ideas make the work smarter, faster, or more founder-centric. Growth at HIEx is earned through initiative, curiosity, and follow-through.
Who We’re Looking For
We care more about mindset than pedigree. If you’re curious, proactive, grounded, and able to think in systems, you’ll thrive here. We are looking for someone who learns quickly, takes ownership, and enjoys working independently once aligned. You should be comfortable making decisions with imperfect information, asking questions when clarity is needed, and balancing business outcomes with real-world impact.
We want someone who is pragmatic but bold. You will support operations as the backbone of great programme delivery.
Above all, you should be someone who believes in innovators and sees supporting them as meaningful work
Technical Skills
- Strong organisational instincts with the ability to manage multiple moving parts across programmes, partners, and innovators.
- Clear, concise communication skills especially in drafting emails, writing summaries, and engaging with external stakeholders.
- Solid planning and coordination ability, including anticipating bottlenecks and keeping timelines on track.
- Strong analytical and organisational skills with the ability to prioritise, identify the most important actions, and organise work in a clear, logical way.
- Comfort working with digital tools (Notion, Airtable, Slack, Google Suite) and maintaining clean, accurate data systems.
- Ability to synthesise information quickly and translate complexity into clear next steps.
- Strong follow-through and discipline, seeing tasks to completion without reminders.
- Good design instincts with the ability to create clean, visually coherent materials for internal and external use (presentation decks, event briefs, one-pagers, simple social or visibility assets).
- Comfortable using design or layout tools (e.g., Canva, Figma, or similar) to support programme visibility and founder-facing materials.
Qualifications
- Experience using tools like Canva, Figma, or equivalent for simple but polished design work is a plus
- 2–3 years of experience in programme management, consulting, venture support, investment operations, or similar roles involving coordination and stakeholder engagement.
- Prior exposure to startups, health innovation, social impact, or entrepreneurship ecosystems is an advantage but not required.
- Demonstrated ability to work independently once aligned, with strong self-management and accountability.
- Experience managing timelines, preparing briefs, drawing insights from meetings, and handling logistics for multi-partner initiatives.
- Comfort working in ambiguous environments and solving operational challenges
- Strong interpersonal skills: able to work well with founders, partners, and cross-cultural teams.
- High curiosity and a systems mindset: understanding how different actors (founders, investors, governments, corporates) fit together and where value is created.
- Ability to produce basic design and visibility materials that look professional and consistent with organisational branding (presentations, session visuals, cohort summaries, etc.).
