Pros
Good way to get exposure to public health work at country level.
Cons
I am working in a situation where I am formally part of a global team but based at the country level. During orientation I was told that one of CHAI’s pillar was to be country-based and the work driven by their country offices in close collaboration with their partner governments. Global teams are supposed to support country team achieve the national priorities for their specific area of interest. What I am observing is totally different. Our global team has internal calls and meeting where strategies are set, we discuss with donors directly and only engage with countries late in the game. At that point, country offices have virtually no role to play, but open doors on the ground to global team members.. ambassadors of sort. Global team would then pitch their ideas to country’s government mid-level or senior managers to ensure their ideas have “local buy-in”. Then most of the work is done by global team members whether based in country or roving between several countries without involvement of almost anyone at the country level proper. In external forums, our leadership presents the data claiming it is based on countries’ priorities and in response to countries’ needs, while in reality, neither the country offices nor the countries proper really have any meaningful role to play, even less have any ownership of the work. This is even made worse by the high turnover in global teams which means any kind of continuity is lost. Turnover at CHAI is due to two main factors: burnout due to high stress with lack of coaching and poaching from other teams for projects suddenly deemed more important that month/quarter/semester. The effect I saw on the country teams was devastating, they did not feel supported and had to use up their political capital for some obscure objective that only moved along some donor’s agenda. This is compounded by the fact that CHAI is promoting people at country level just for political reasons without the right skills or any clear performance evaluations. CHAI’s reputation in country is definitely in jeopardy because of the lack of an effective structure to engage with partner countries and no experienced (real) managers.