By Karl Hofmann, President and CEO, PSI
Today we’re announcing several new leadership appointments that we believe will help accelerate PSI’s transition to a different and exciting future.
The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the importance of health systems in meeting public health needs worldwide. It has also spotlighted the critical role of individual behaviors, social norms and self-care in achieving public health goals. For PSI, it has strengthened our resolve that the future lies in more Consumer Powered Healthcare.
But as we’ve commemorated our 50th anniversary, we understand our role as an international NGO must change from what it has been over the past ten years. National organizations in most of the countries where we work are capable and resilient – we know, because we’ve worked with them for years, and in some cases, we helped to start them. As we step back and reconceive of our work as helping to shape mixed public-private health systems towards Universal Health Coverage, we are less in the direct “doing” and more in the “partnering” phase of our institutional life.
We believe these changes require a smaller headquarters staff in Washington and more decision-making power and investment in our country programs and PSI Network Members, whose leadership ranks are a diverse mixture of African, Asian, Latin and Western talent. In fact, two-thirds of our leadership are from the countries we serve. As a result, PSI’s Global Services support structure has been rightsized and right shaped to serve our strategy and shifting role.
Several new leadership appointments will help accelerate this shift:
Michael Holscher has been appointed PSI’s Chief Delivery Officer, with overall responsibility for PSI’s technical leadership, country operations, strategy and fundraising functions, to ensure we deliver effective and efficient value to our funders, our government partners and our health consumers in the Global South. Michael brings to this role more than 15 years of executive leadership in large international organizations undergoing significant change. He earlier worked for more than 13 years in resident leadership roles in Southern Africa, Southeast Asia, Central America and Eastern Europe, helping to build national leadership and partnerships to advance global health goals.
Dr. Susan Mpganga Mukasa has been appointed Vice President for Global Operations Africa. She has over 15 years of experience overseeing the implementation of health programs in Africa, including partnerships with major donors and multilateral organizations, national governments, corporate partners and more recently philanthropists investing in health for development. Critical to Susan’s success is the close collaboration and management of people from diverse cultures. She is an MD and a Chartered Accountant.
Amy LaTrielle has been appointed Vice President for Global Operations (Asia, Latin America, Global Fund) and Operation Excellence. She brings more than 20 years’ experience providing strategic leadership and operational and financial guidance and oversight to some of PSI’s largest regions in revenue generation and health impact. This includes time as PSI’s Deputy Country Representative in Nepal, where she was responsible for leadership of a complex $40 million donor-funded country operation, and as Deputy Director for West and Central Africa, PSI’s largest health impact-generating region. More recently, Amy served as Director of PSI’s Global Fund Management Unit.
Ellen Tipper has been appointed Vice President for Strategy & Insights. She will lead a multi-disciplinary team to champion the use of consumer and market insights in global strategy, program design and adaptive implementation in advancing Consumer Powered Healthcare. Ellen has over 20 years of experience in strategy development working with a diverse range of non-profit and commercial organizations in both advisor and director positions. She has worked with teams in over 25 countries across Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, including her time serving as PSI’s Marketing Director and Deputy Country Representative in Cote d’Ivoire.
I am excited by our more streamlined and focused approach to the next phase of PSI’s work and delighted to be working with this senior team to help execute it.
And we will build on a strong foundation.
For 50 years, PSI has been building our social marketing capabilities and delivering high quality healthcare products and services to consumers in more than 50 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean. We take pride in our role in creating and expanding national condom markets, in distributing over 400 million long-lasting insecticide treated mosquito nets that helped to drive malaria mortality down substantially across Africa, in helping women to avert 6.5 million unintended pregnancies last year, and every year, and in driving down HIV incidence in some of the most heavily affected parts of the world. We have built supply chains, worked with a variety of private and public sector partners to deliver health impact at scale, and partnered with others to bring about breakthroughs in health regulations, most recently in advancing self-care in health as an important driver toward Universal Health Coverage.
Most importantly we have created a global PSI network of more than 30 high-performing national non-profits that subscribe to global governance best practices and that are built to last.
We’ll share more soon about how we are moving decision-making closer to these country offices and elevating new leaders there too. Thanks for sharing this journey with us.
