Program Management Associate
Application Deadline: Rolling, with a final closure no later than April 26th, 2026. Applications may close sooner if a suitable candidate is found.
Expected Hours: 40 hours/week (full time)
Location: Gombe, Nigeria - at least 9 months out of the year
Compensation: Dependent on need and experience. For expatriates, Taimaka will provide housing, fund visa costs, and reimburse thrice per year international travel to/from Nigeria. See note.
Reports To: Program Director. Excerpt of org chart here.
Start Date: As soon as possible, ideally sometime in May 2026.
How to Apply: Fill out this application form https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdrDghP-SRRCmI3Jblsjiz5XsAl36Ow5X3j6LVpXg99hC92sA/viewform .
Summary
We’re looking for an enterprising early career to mid career professional to join Taimaka’s Program team and lead projects designed to drive the expansion of Taimaka’s cutting-edge malnutrition treatment program, improve program outcomes, and save more lives. In this role, you will serve as a ‘programs generalist,’ reporting to Taimaka’s Program Director and working alongside Taimaka’s outpatient and inpatient treatment managers.
You will tackle priority projects necessary to solve program problems or remove bottlenecks for expansion. For instance, one month you might work with our inpatient treatment manager on creating new protocols for oxygen therapy use while overseeing the rollout of backup power supplies for our oxygen concentrators, and another month you might work with our outpatient treatment manager to plan improved case-finding efforts.
We’d love for you to have a background in health service delivery or public health, but what we’re really looking for here is someone who wants to come into our programs, dive into the details, and obsess about how to implement better than we are now. We’re looking for someone who cares deeply and innately about cost-effectiveness, and is comfortable making the kinds of difficult tradeoffs inherent to scaling global health work in difficult operational environments.
If you can move fast, think rigorously, implement quickly, and want to become a subject matter expert on acute malnutrition and how to treat it, you fit the position. Taimaka is trying to scale to treat 100,000 children per year within five years. This role is a critical part of making that happen.
About Taimaka
Taimaka is a highly cost-effective, Founders Pledge recommended/GiveWell funded nonprofit that delivers reimagined pediatric malnutrition treatment to save the lives of the world’s most vulnerable children. We implement a modified form of community management of acute malnutrition (CMAM) treatment targeting children with severe acute malnutrition (SAM) in Gombe State, Nigeria. We are currently dramatically expanding our treatment program to reach 20k patients in 2026, and 30k patients in 2027. You can read more about our work here.
About the Job
Taimaka’s treatment program is scaling quickly: we’re trying to go from 5k patients in 2024 to 20k patients in 2026, and 30k by 2027. That kind of growth constantly surfaces new problems: protocols that worked at a smaller scale start to break down, facilities need upgrades, staff need new skills, and expansion into new areas requires planning and coordination that our existing management team doesn't have bandwidth to take on alone.
As a Program Management Associate, you are the person who makes sure these problems actually get solved. You'll work alongside Taimaka's Program Director and our outpatient and inpatient treatment managers to identify the most pressing blockers to program quality and expansion, then take ownership of designing and implementing solutions from start to finish. You’ll help develop our treatment protocols and organizational practices to smooth the path towards scale.
This is a generalist role. The best person for this role is a utility infielder: someone who can hop onto any problem, figure out what needs to happen, and drive it to completion. You don't need to be a specialist in any one area; you need to be the kind of person who can quickly get up to speed on an unfamiliar problem, design a practical approach, and then actually implement it.
Specific Responsibilities
Solve Program Problems - 75% of your time
• Once assigned to a project, or once you’ve identified one yourself, take it from problem to solution:
• Diagnose the issue. Get into our facilities, talk to staff, review data, and understand what's going wrong and why.
• Design an approach. Draft protocols, create trainings, build tools, plan rollouts. Research what other organizations have done and incorporate what works.
• Implement. On each project, you'll work closely with the relevant manager and their staff: embedding with the outpatient or inpatient team as needed. Depending on the project, you may also recruit and oversee your own supporting staff, such as temporary field enumerators or a junior program officer.
• Project manage the rollout: set timelines, hold people to them, troubleshoot as things go sideways. Provide hands-on support to program staff throughout.
• Follow through. Monitor whether the solution is actually working. Adjust if it isn't. Integrate changes into our core program protocols so our lessons actually get learned.
Identify What Needs Fixing - 15% of your time
• Embed with our program team. Get out from behind your desk and spend time in Taimaka's treatment facilities every week.
• Develop strong context on what's working, what isn't, and where the biggest opportunities for improvement are.
• Work with the Program Director to prioritize which problems to tackle based on their expected impact on cost-effectiveness and program quality.
• Build Program Team Capacity - 10% of your time
• Help upskill program staff through trainings, mentorship, and on-the-job coaching.
• Support the development of junior staff working on program projects.
• Contribute to building Taimaka's institutional knowledge by documenting protocols, lessons learned, and best practices.
Apply : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1atgFhde6uN5vZxiHZKOC3RnIP4g_vRk1EgImkB6ogV8/edit?tab=t.0