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Job Description
Business Lead, Social Business Unit
US–Washington, DC
Job ID: 2025-3929
Type: Local Hire/Affiliate
# of Openings: 1
Population Services International
Overview
Business Lead, Social Business Unit
Location: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Location type: Onsite
Reports to: Acting Africa Lead
Travel: Up to 20% Local & International Travel
Welcome to PSI!
PSI is a network of locally rooted, globally connected organizations working to achieve consumer-powered healthcare — people-centered health systems that ensure quality, affordable care wherever and whenever it is needed. Our origins in sexual and reproductive health have grown into a broader mission. Today, we work with the public and private sectors as well as local communities, prioritizing people’s voice and choice and developing solutions to meet their essential health needs. Over the past five decades, we have helped push boundaries, break taboos, set trends, and develop innovative solutions to complex global health challenges.
PSI is now moving forward with a Social Enterprise approach in key markets within the Southern, Eastern & West Africa regions. This approach includes using commercial models, appropriate marketing, and pricing strategies as well as driving procurement and operational efficiencies to set up and grow a sustainable business model for women’s health products and services.
Join us!
PSI Ethiopia seeks to employ a dynamic and results-driven Business Lead for its Income Generating Activity unit that will help us execute to strategy focusing on generating sustainable growth of the business. You will bring a deep expertise and strong knowledge of the commercial pharmaceutical or wellness market to drive business growth, ensure operational excellence, and execute the social enterprise vision in the Ethiopian market. This role involves assessing and maximizing market potential, exploring new opportunities, and developing innovative business cases for a portfolio of pharmaceutical and women’s health products. Additionally, you will ensure the strategic alignment of existing business operations, including sales and distribution, and drive the growth of our digital activities in Ethiopia.
You will also be part of discussions to establish regional partnerships that ensure operational efficiency, foster business growth, and advance the vision for a fully-fledged digital ecosystem in East Africa, with Ethiopia being a key market in the region.
You will report to the Acting Africa Lead and supervise in-market teams in Ethiopia, including a sales team, a warehouse team and a finance and admin team. You will coordinate closely with the PSI Ethiopia leadership on the nonprofit side of PSI and liaise with various teams at global and regional level.
Responsibilities
What You’ll Do
Business Development and Innovation:
- Identify and explore new business opportunities in commercial markets for healthcare
and wellness in Ethiopia
- Conduct feasibility studies and assess the market potential for new commercial
ventures.
- Develop comprehensive business cases and business plans for new ideas and projects.
- Search for and secure funds or investments to support new initiatives.
Strategic Business Oversight:
- Oversee the development and execution of strategic plans for current business.
- Ensure business plans are implemented efficiently and effectively, tracking key
performance metrics. Oversee P&L results and take corrective action as needed.
- Provides guidance to the various business functions, including sales, digital and
operations to improve efficiency and productivity
Digital Strategy:
- Execute the global VIYA digital strategy in the Ethiopia market
- Collaborate with internal and external colleagues to develop a cohesive regional
digital ecosystem and identify revenue streams through digital activities.
- Identify and cultivate partnerships that can help accelerate the business vision roll out
in Ethiopia
Stakeholder Engagement & Representation:
- Position the organization within the local community by identifying stakeholders,
seeking funding, and integrating evidence into business model design.
- Represent the organization to local businesses, investors, governments, and other
stakeholders, ensuring a balance between profitability and social impact.
- Collaborate closely with the nonprofit side to align operations and strategic objectives.
Operational Efficiency & Governance:
- Lead the development of efficient systems to ensure operational excellence
- Oversee financial, administrative, and logistical resources, ensuring adherence to
standards, policies, and strategic objectives.
- Support change management processes to adapt to new technologies and
approaches.
People Management:
- Recruit, support, and manage team members, fostering a culture of highperformance, accountability, innovation, and client focus.
- Prepare and execute annual budgets, work plans, and performance measures to
achieve organizational goals.
Performance Measurement & Reporting:
- Monitor and report on key performance indicators (KPIs) for both business and digital
activities.
- Gather data and insights to measure performance against strategic objectives,
optimizing plans to improve business outcomes.
Knowledge Management:
- Develop and implement strategies for capturing, sharing, and utilizing organizational
knowledge to drive continuous improvement and innovation.
- Foster a culture of learning by ensuring best practices, insights, and data are
effectively documented, disseminated, and applied across teams and projects.
- Promote the use of digital tools and platforms to enhance collaboration and
knowledge exchange among internal and external stakeholders
This is not an exhaustive list of all tasks that an incumbent is expected to perform but is instead a summary of the primary responsibilities and requirements of the job. The incumbent may be asked to perform duties not included above. PSI reserves the right to revise job profiles at any time based on changes to the required job responsibilities.
Qualifications
What You’ll Bring
- University Degree in Commerce or Marketing, a postgraduate qualification is essential (MBA).
- 10 years’ experience of which at least 5 years should be managing a P&L.
- Cross functional (commercial) management experience (operations, sales, marketing, finance & human resources)
- First-hand experience in the commercial pharmaceutical, or wellness sector required\
- Strong understanding of healthcare market dynamics in Ethiopia
- Strong analytical, problem-solving, and decision-making skills.
- Strong strategic planning skills and experience in developing winning strategies for healthcare businesses
- Excellent communication, negotiation, and stakeholder management skills.
- English Language proficiency is required for this role
- Ability to work in fast-paced, diverse, and multicultural environments
Personal Attributes:
- Entrepreneurial minded self-starter
- High level decision maker
- Proactive, self-driven, passionate
- Excellent people skills and Emotional maturity
- Problem solving skills, critical thinker
- Strong Leadership and tenacity
- Action orientated
- Independent thinker
- Ability to recognize new business ventures
- Experience working with or in collaboration with social impact organizations and ventures.
- Strong network of contacts in the Ethiopian business and investment community.
- Experience in leading cross-border teams and managing multi-stakeholder projects
We know that a long list of requirements may be discouraging, but don’t let imposter syndrome or the confidence gap get in the way of you applying — we’d love to hear from you.
About PSI
Did you know that we have over 3,000 “PSIers” working across the globe in 40 different countries? We’re a diverse group with a wide range of backgrounds from the medical industry to the music industry, all with unique skills we bring to the job. We value self-motivated people with a track record for getting things done in tough situations. We take our work seriously, but not ourselves.
Interested in Learning More?
PSI is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and encourages applications from individuals regardless of actual or perceived race, religion, tribal belonging, color, sex, age, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, marital status, personal appearance, matriculation, political affiliation, family status or responsibilities, gender identity or expression, pregnancy, childbirth, related medical conditions or breastfeeding, genetic information, amnesty, veteran, special disabled veteran or uniform service member status or employment status. PSI is a safe, inclusive workplace that welcomes people from all backgrounds and walks of life, and it’s reflected in our diverse community.
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Apply Here
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About the Organization
About PSI:
PSI is a leading global health organization with programs targeting malaria, child survival, HIV and reproductive health. Working in partnership within the public and private sectors, and harnessing the power of the markets, PSI provides life-saving products, clinical services and behavior change communications that empower the world's most vulnerable populations, in over 65 countries to lead healthier lives. Over 150 staff in the Washington D.C headquarters, 100 overseas expatriate staff and almost 8,000 local staff work to execute PSI’s critical and innovative programs worldwide.
Health Impact and Donors:
PSI has a unique focus on measurable health impact much like successful corporations measure profitability. Measuring the results of PSI’s health interventions isn’t as simple as counting lives saved. PSI employs an entire team of researchers to continuously evaluate PSI performance against evidence-based objectives and verifiable indicators. Such strict measurement of PSI performance is what sets the organization apart from others in the field and feeds into the design of innovative, targeted and cost-effective interventions.
By utilizing the DALY (Disability Adjusted Life Year) system, PSI estimates that in 2009 alone, its programs directly prevented more than 156,000 HIV infections, 2.6 million unintended pregnancies, almost 150,000 deaths from malaria and diarrhea and 19 million malaria episodes. In addition, roughly 25,000 patients were treated for TB.
With a focus on decentralized management and local experts, innovative programs and successful benchmarking, PSI is proud of its long term commitment to serve those most in need. PSI is supported by several major donors including: governments of the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands; the Global Fund, various United Nations agencies, private foundations, corporations and individuals.
Areas of PSI focus:
HIV:
PSI has HIV programs in over 60 countries around the world. Interventions, which include social marketing of HIV products and services and targeted HIV communications, are based upon a commitment to produce measurable health impact and an emphasis upon rigorous research and evaluation. Although condom social marketing and targeted communications remain the cornerstones of PSI's work to address the HIV pandemic, country programs also implement an increasingly comprehensive range of interventions in response to the changing needs of specific country contexts and populations. PSI is increasingly implementing innovations such as male circumcision services and targeted communications for concurrent sexual partnerships and injection drug use interventions.
TB:
Tuberculosis (TB) is a curable and preventable illness, yet it remains a major cause of death worldwide. It is one of the biggest killers of women of reproductive age and the most common cause of death among people living with HIV/AIDS. PSI provides a variety of innovative TB and TB/HIV-related services, engaging private providers in diagnosis and treatment and integrating HIV counseling and testing with TB services. It also creates innovative behavior change communications campaigns to increase awareness of TB and TB/HIV and to promote healthy behaviors.
Child Survival:
Vulnerable children are one of PSI’s most important target groups. According to the WHO, nearly 10 million children under the age of five die each year – more than 1,000 every hour. Tragically, about two-thirds of child deaths are preventable through practical, low-cost interventions. PSI works to improve child survival by helping developing countries address water-borne diseases such as diarrhea, malaria, pneumonia and HIV with prevention and treatment education and products. PSI’s child survival programs improve the health and save the lives of children under five in more than 30 countries.
Reproductive Health:
In over 30 countries throughout the world PSI empowers women and couples to lead healthier lives by providing access to innovative family planning and maternal health products and services. Every year, there are more than 60 million unintended pregnancies and more than 500,000 women die from pregnancy-related causes. In 2008 alone, PSI prevented an estimated 3.1 million unintended pregnancies and 15,000 maternal deaths, and enabled millions of couples to plan their families.
Over the past three decades, PSI has expanded the contraceptive methods in its portfolio from male condoms and oral contraceptives to include injectable contraceptives, intrauterine contraceptive devices (IUD), emergency contraception pills, implants, female condoms, voluntary sterilization, and fertility awareness methods such as the Standard Days Method using Cyclebeads®. PSI’s RH platform has also grown to address maternal mortality through the prevention of post-partum hemorrhage and sepsis, and the prevention of unsafe abortion.
Clean Water:
Access to clean water is a challenge in almost all of the countries PSI operates in. Increasing awareness of water borne diseases and accessibility to treated water are a core part of PSI’s efforts across its health areas.
PSI and its many partners are working together to promote the Safe Water System, a water quality intervention that employs proven, easy-to-use and inexpensive solutions such as household water treatment appropriate for the developing world. Household water treatment and safe storage ensures that each sip of water is safe to drink. Household water treatment can be adopted quickly, inexpensively, at national scale in both development and emergency situations, making an immediate difference on the lives of those who rely on transporting to and storing water in their homes.
Malaria:
PSI provides malaria control support to national Ministries of Health in over 30 countries worldwide. PSI tailors its malaria control programs to the unique environment in each country and the needs outlined by the Ministry of Health to achieve the Abuja Targets and MDGs. PSI’s malaria control programs include delivery of insecticide treated mosquito nets, pre-packaged malaria treatment, behavior change communications and operational research.
