Global Communications and Development Specialist

Organization: Jacaranda Health

Location: Anywhere

Contract Type: Contract, negotiable

Preferred Start Date: May 2025

About Jacaranda Health:

Jacaranda Health is a nonprofit organization whose mission for the last nine years has been to improve maternal and newborn health outcomes in the public health system. We work hand-in-hand with governments, including county health management teams and Ministries of Health across Sub Saharan Africa, to deploy affordable and scalable solutions through public hospitals, where the majority of underserved mothers and babies receive care.

Role Overview: Jacaranda is looking for a skilled analytical writer and strategist to tell the story of our work—what we’re learning, why it matters, and how it’s improving care for mothers and babies. This is a technical role, best suited to someone who’s comfortable diving into the back-end of complex AI tools, global health policies, or real-time dashboards, and can bring structure and clarity to what we’re learning. You’ll turn complex information - data, research, and program insights - into clear, compelling proposals, reports, and case studies for funders, partners, and global communities of practice. You’ll lead and support the writing of major grant proposals, track new funding opportunities, and shape how we show up in donor conversations and global forums. This role is ideal for someone who can make technical work accessible, and who’s excited to write for impact.

Main Responsibilities:

1. Technical writing: documentation and dissemination:

• Produce deep dives (including briefs, toolkits, playbooks, case studies) that document the learnings, data-driven insights, and findings from Jacaranda’s work, including technology design/development, quality assurance, and research activities.

• Support the dissemination of these pieces within health communities of practice, task forces and development media (familiarity with these global forums is encouraged)

1. Funder acquisition and grant writing:

   • Lead/support the technical write-up for select grant proposals

   • Identify new funding opportunities (eg. institutional donors, foundations, multi-year funders) to catalyse Jacaranda’s growth and impact strategy

   • Assist in tracking and reporting on grant pipeline, outcomes, evaluating effectiveness, and supporting ongoing grant management activities

2. Routine and informal donor reporting:

   • Narrative development for formal and informal donor reporting, as well as other routine impact reports, such as annual and quarterly impact reports.

   • Support with informal donor touchpoints (eg. conferences, site visits, convenings).

3. Strategic communications and external engagement

   • Support Jacaranda’s contributions to global dialogues on digital health, AI, maternal and newborn health, including within global communities of practice, digital innovation networks, forums, and working groups.

   • Prepare high-impact presentations, narrative storytelling, and talking points for funder meetings and global convenings.

   • Facilitate partnerships and knowledge-sharing with peer organizations, funders, and research institutions.

Who you are:

• First and foremost, you are someone who has done this work before and can hit the ground running. You must be familiar with global health, delivering strategic communications, and raising funds.

• You are someone who can take the back-end of a complex digital health intervention or health system strengthening approach and make a readable grant proposal or report from it.

• You have successfully won grants and/or shepherded funder relationships

• You are comfortable with highly technical topics and numbers

• You can turn a research paper into an compelling learning resource or insights piece

• You make your colleagues look good in global conferences with slick presentations.

  
  

What you can do:

• 5+ years minimum relevant professional experience, in strategic communications, external relations, fundraising, and/or development.

• Demonstrated experience (ie. a writing portfolio) in technical writing such as grant proposals, donor reporting, academic research, policy briefs, technical case studies, and blogs.

  
  

Application Process

Interested candidates should submit a CV, a brief cover letter (that tells us something more/different than what is in your CV), and - ideally - a portfolio of authored writing samples by 25th April 2025. Given this a communications-related role, screened applications that are determined to have relied on AI will be disregarded.