Assistant Program Officer, Providing Access to Safe

Overview:

- CHAI is an Equal Opportunity Employer, and is committed to providing an environment of fairness, and mutual respect where all applicants have access to equal employment opportunities. CHAI values diversity and inclusion, and recognizes that our mission is best advanced by the leadership and contributions of people with diverse experience, backgrounds, and culture._

CHAI, in partnership with its India affiliate William J Clinton Foundation (WJCF), works in close partnership with and under the guidance of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) at the Central and States' levels on an array of high priority initiatives aimed at improving health outcomes. Currently, CHAI supports government partners across projects to expand access to quality care and treatment for HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis, tuberculosis, COVID-19, common cancers, sexual and reproductive health, immunization and essential medicines.

Talent is the fundamental driver of WJCF’s success in helping save lives and reduce the burden of disease. WJCF’s organizational values reflect its relentless endeavour of hiring, nurturing, empowering, and celebrating diverse and high calibre individuals who come together to work as cohesive teams. WJCF places a high premium on providing its staff with an enabling environment that encourages entrepreneurship, humility, respect, equal share of voice and fosters high impact innovation to address some of the most challenging healthcare issues.

**Project Background**

“Leveraging entrepreneurship to provide access to safe drinking water” is a project rolled out with an objective to ensure access to safe drinking water to rural communities in areas which are affected with water quality issues. One major concern of water quality is high concentration of fluoride in ground water. Long term exposure to fluoride can cause fluorosis
- a condition that affect teeth and bones. Fluorosis also brings down the body’s iron absorption capacity and thus intensifies anemia and malnutrition. The project sets up up Community Water Treatment Plants (CWTPs), run by women collectives or Self Help Groups (SHGs) ensuring door-step delivery of treated safe drinking water to affected villages in their catchment areas. Therefore, the project minimizes water-borne diseases and anemia induced malnutrition, while enabling livelihood to rural women.

**Program Overview**

Since 2016, WJCF has been working towards reducing malnutrition and anemia among children, adolescent girls, women of reproductive age and mothers in Madhya Pradesh. To this end, WJCF, under the leadership of government of Madhya Pradesh (GoMP), has been implementing comprehensive set of interventions to enable seamless delivery of public health and nutrition schemes/services and thereby reduce anemia and malnutrition.

While it is important to enable service delivery efficiencies to directly manage health and nutrition indicators, it is also critical to improve access to safe drinking water since drinking water is an underlying cause to several health conditions. Natural chemical contaminations such as presence of fluoride are particularly challenging, because the only way to tackle is to enable access to alternate drinking water, that is free of contamination. Excess consumption of fluoride causes fluorosis which causes corrosion of enamel and swollen gums (in children between 1-4 years) and long-term intake of fluoride causes skeletal degeneration, which retards absorption of calcium. Fluorosis also reduces the absorption of key micronutrients such as iron and calcium, thereby increasing the risk of anaemia to the exposed population, particularly pregnant women.

To address this issue, a unique community entrepreneurship-based model of a Community Water Treatment Plant (CWTP) was successfully piloted in one of the blocks that is affected by high fluorosis. The Public Health Engineering Department (PHED), under the flagship program, “Jal Jeevan Mission” (JJM) plans to scale up the model through women collectives or Self-help Groups (SHGs). WJCF is supporting this ambitious plan by providing technical and program management support to the GoMP.

Position Summary

**Responsibilities**:
**Strategic**
- Support the program for Access to Safe Drinking water and drive the strategic roadmap for ‘Access to Safe Drinking Water’
- Assist the Program Manager in donor communication and reporting as per the requirement of the project
- Support in developing business models (financial modelling) aimed at increasing efficiency of the entire CWTP vis a vis keeping the system sustainable.

**Program Operations**
- Provide research and analytical support to the department as per requirement.
- Identifying innovative models for promoting access to safe drinking water by involving community and driving end-to-end plant operations in the identified geographical span
- Liaison with the State and district level officials for efficient and timely execution of the