Lifting Up Emerging Leaders: A New Structure to Elevate Local Expertise  

Jul 26, 2024

Integrate Health has launched an organizational restructuring designed to position our organization for continued growth. While organizational changes are typically neither noteworthy or exciting, this one stands out for its focus on empowering and creating space for local leaders.  

This new step forward in Integrate Health’s growth represents a large leap in our ongoing commitment to advancing local leadership. As we highlighted last year, local leadership at Integrate Health means being deeply attuned to community needs, continually reassessing power dynamics, and fostering an inclusive and equitable decision-making process. 

Operating in two countries in West Africa and supported by staff spread across the globe, Integrate Health is a global organization. We also maintain a strong commitment, that we have held since our founding nearly 20 years ago, to remain locally led and to continually shift resources, decision-making power, and authority closer to the communities we serve. For us this is a way to not only build more resilient health systems but also to foster trust and collaboration while elevating knowledge and expertise critical to unlocking impact at scale. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that our recent restructuring creates more space for local leaders to grow and shine at all levels of our organization, including on our Executive Team.  

By shifting to a multi-country organization, we needed a scalable structure that relied on our greatest strength: the technical expertise of our teammates. Our new structure is therefore led by an eight-member executive team comprised of our CEO, five functional leads driving technical expertise and our two country directors implementing our country strategies for impact.

As such, the new organizational structure accomplishes three critical objectives: 

  • It leverages our deep talent. Recognizing that many staff possess significant experience and expertise, the new structure repositions key staff, at all levels of the organization and regardless of where they are based, into support roles so that they can assist programs in both Togo and Guinea with their valuable skills and expertise. 
  • It promotes existing talents into leadership positions. With the new structure, five team leads will oversee the five functional teams. Former Togo Director of Finance and Administration is being promoted to the role of Senior Director of Finance and Operations, one of the five functional leads that supports the entire organization across countries. The new Executive Team will retain the expertise of our two Country Directors, making the current team majority-African and majority-based in West Africa. Other leaders have been promoted to new roles at all levels of the organization. 
  • It creates space for new talent. With the new structure we will also be launching recruitment for two new leaders, Senior Director of Human Resources and Senior Director of Programs. Both roles will be functional team leads and sit on the Executive Team. More information on the roles is available here. We are excited to launch an aggressive recruitment process to identify the best candidates to join our team in West Africa! We sincerely appreciate your help in spreading the word far and wide. Please introduce us to anyone who you think might be a good fit! 

This change is only the next step in our ongoing commitment to ensure that we are best positioned to better innovate, solve problems and serve our patients. We know that we can do this while advancing our commitment to remain led by representatives of the communities we serve. Above all, we know that these decisions, small steps and big leaps, bring us closer to realizing our mission of ensuring access to quality primary healthcare for all. Thank you for accompanying us on this exciting journey.