Deputy Med-Ops Cell Manager

MSF Ubuntu is looking for a D****eputy Med-Ops Cell Manager (Medical)

Do your skills and experience not precisely match the requirements? At MSF Ubuntu, we strive to create a safe, diverse and inclusive workplace, recognizing the need to increase access to professional opportunities for historically underrepresented groups. If you're interested in this position but your experience doesn't align perfectly with the selection criteria, we encourage you to apply anyway. You might be the ideal candidate for this or other positions.

Firmly committed to Safeguarding patients, community members, staff and all those in contact with the organization from all forms of abuse including Sexual Exploitation, Abuse, and Harassment (SEAH), we will take all necessary steps to ensure that confirmed perpetrators of abuse will not join the organization, enabled through rigorous vetting processes.

For this position, contact level with patients and children is categorized as Medium Risk and will be monitored with this in regard.

Introduction

Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) is an international independent medical humanitarian organisation that provides assistance to people affected by conflicts, epidemics, and natural or human-made disasters and excluded from healthcare. We provide this assistance without discrimination, irrespective of race, religion, creed or political affiliation.

About MSF Ubuntu

MSF Ubuntu is the newest Operational Directorate (OD) of Médecins Sans Frontières, grounded in the principles of Ubuntu – “I am because we are”. With a base blended between the offices of MSF Southern Africa and MSF Eastern Africa and a strong emphasis on interdependence, interoperability, and maximizing sustainable outcomes, MSF Ubuntu seeks to add a new approach to the delivery of medical humanitarian action to the movement by placing communities at the heart of decision-making.

Job Purpose

The Deputy Cell Manager (Medical Profile) co-leads the medical-operational interface within the MSF Ubuntu Med-Ops Cell. The role ensures that medical-operational strategy, program quality, and patient outcomes are central to medical operational decisions, while maintaining agility, collaboration, and shared accountability.

Subject and Description

The MSF Ubuntu Med-Ops Cell operates on a collective, integrated Med-Ops model emphasizing:

• Collaborative and shared leadership between Operations and Medical managers.
• Strong collaboration across departments (Med, Ops, Emergency manager, Community Engagement, People & Culture, Logistics & Supply, Finance, Advocacy and communications).
• Decentralized decision-making with high Country programs proximity.
• A people-cantered, context-driven approach (“Ubuntu”: I am because we are).

In this model, the Deputy Cell Manager (Medical Profile) is not only a technical manager/advisor but acts as a co-owner of medical operational decisions, ensuring medical priorities shape strategy, implementation, continuous follow up and learning.

Strategic Role within MSF Ubuntu

The Med-Ops Deputy Cell Manager (Medical Profile) closely working with Med-Ops cell manager is expected to operationalise the strategic pillars of MSF Ubuntu by ensuring that the country programs portfolio contributes to:

• Community leadership and people-centred care: Moving beyond community engagement towards meaningful community participation and, where possible, shared decision-making in programme design, implementation, adaptation and handover. Consideration to the ongoing climate crisis to be integrated into people-centred care, with a longer-term view on maximising sustainable outcomes for communities.
• Being rooted locally and acting globally: Drawing on the knowledge, relationships, innovations and lived experience of Eastern and Southern Africa, while developing operational approaches that can strengthen MSF’s global medical-humanitarian action.
• Maximising sustainable outcomes: Ensuring that MSF Ubuntu operations aim to have strong immediate impact while also leaving tangible positive outcomes for patients, communities and local health systems after MSF’s presence changes or ends.
• Interdependence: Working through deliberate collaboration with MSF entities, local actors, communities, academia, institutions and operational support hubs, avoiding unnecessary duplication and building common capacity where it strengthens operations.
• Accountability: Strengthening accountability to patients, communities, staff, supporters, MSF Ubuntu governance and the wider MSF movement through clear decision-making, feedback, learning and transparent performance monitoring.
• Emergency responsiveness and operational agility: Ensuring that MSF Ubuntu prioritises emergency response, critical gaps in humanitarian assistance, and the needs of the most vulnerable, while building operational capacity progressively and responsibly.
• Equity, diversity, inclusion and safeguarding: Embedding inclusive power dynamics, affirmative action, duty of care, safe recruitment, responsible off-boarding and safeguarding into both operational delivery and team leadership.
• Restless activist spirit and bearing witness: Ensuring that advocacy, analysis, representation, networking and communications are integrated into operations, with patients and communities having a greater share of voice in public positioning and advocacy choices.

Responsibilities / Result Areas

Co-Leadership in Med-Ops Decision-Making

• Act as a core member of the Med-Ops Cell leadership, jointly responsible for strategic and medical operational decisions.
• Ensure medical perspectives are systematically integrated into operational planning and prioritization, and decision making.
• Participate in collective decision-making processes, promoting shared ownership and accountability.
• Deputize for the Med-Ops Cell Manager when required.

Medical Strategy & Operational Integration

• Co-develop and implement country programs strategies with strong medical, person-people centered care and community drive, anticipatory programming elements in all its country programs.
• Validation of medical strategies, technical guidelines and related protocols applied in the country programs in close collaboration with the CMedCo, Country Management team and relevant cell members.
• Ensure programs are need-driven, evidence-based, and person and people-centered and impactful.
• Align Country program strategies with MSF Ubuntu Strategic plans and global health priorities.
• Balance operational feasibility with medical ambition.

Quality of Care & Patient Outcomes

• Champion patient safety and quality of care as a central pillar of medical operations.
• Monitor and analyze key medical indicators, patient and community feedback ensuring timely corrective actions, in close collaboration with the Country Coordination teams and Med-Ops Cell members.
• Lead or co-lead planning and reporting cycles, project reviews and performance discussions with a strong medical lens.
• Promote continuous quality improvement (CQI) and innovation.

Country Programs Engagement & Proximity

• Maintain close engagement with country programs, ensuring responsiveness to local context and realities.
• Provide direct support to Country Medical Coordinators (CMedCo), and coordination teams and project teams.
• Responsible for validation and approval of international medical orders (IMOs) and escalating exceptional local purchasing validation to UBT section pharmacist and team.
• Responsible at Med-cell level supporting Staff Health related issues and decision making closely working with CMedCo and SHU.
• Participate in programs visits, conduct assessments, program initiations/start-ups, and be part of the team during interventions.
• Coordinate and Chair the Health