Communications Manager

Communications Manager

Reporting To: Chief of Staff

Department: Communications

Classification Level: Manager

Location: Global (remote); Africa-based candidates preferred.

About Healthy Learners

Healthy Learners is an award-winning non-profit organisation working to improve the health and learning of children across Zambia—and soon, beyond. In partnership with the Government of Zambia, we bring healthcare directly into schools so that children stay healthy, stay in class, and reach their full potential. Our model is government-owned and government-led, fully embedded in national priorities, systems, and structures.

Today, we have 1,062 health rooms, trained 8,370 School Health Teachers, and operate in districts across all ten provinces, reaching more than 1.4 million learners through Zambia's first integrated School Health Program. Our approach combines school-based service delivery with technical assistance to government at every level—strengthening planning, supervision, data use, and local capacity to deliver.

As we complete our national scale-up and look toward new horizons, we're focused on deepening programme quality, strengthening delivery systems, and laying the foundation for long-term government leadership. We're looking for a dynamic operational leader to help drive this next chapter—someone ready to manage complexity at scale and help a proven model achieve lasting impact.

Healthy Learners is the proud recipient of the Skoll Award for Social Innovation, the Duke F.M. Kirby Prize, and the Lipman Family Prize from the University of Pennsylvania. These awards reflect not just our success to date, but the strength of the opportunity ahead. If this mission resonates with you, we'd love to hear from you.

About You

You exemplify the qualities of being Humble, Hungry, and Smart in your leadership:

• Humble (Continuous Learning & Inclusion): You actively seek, encourage, and facilitate feedback sharing, fostering an environment of continuous learning. You adapt and grow continuously, cultivating a culture of inclusion and belonging.
• Hungry (Efficiency, Excellence, and Innovation): Your relentless drive for efficiency and excellence is evident in your approach to both everyday tasks and complex challenges. When obstacles arise, you don't merely seek answers; you develop solutions and establish structures to address future obstacles proactively. Your hunger for innovation permeates the organisation, where you eagerly explore new and best practices, ensuring our people's operations remain modern and highly effective.
• Smart (Emotional Intelligence & Psychological Safety): Your exceptional emotional intelligence is your superpower, allowing you to create psychological safety within the organization. Through your ability to build trust, encourage risk-taking, and nurture courageous conversations, you promote an environment where individuals can thrive and collaborate effectively.

Position Overview

This is a new role for Healthy Learners. We have strong messaging and a powerful story to tell, but we have never had a person responsible for communications across the full organization. That changes with this role. We are looking for someone who takes our story, our evidence, and our leaders' voices and turns them into world-class communications, delivered consistently and on time.

The Communications Manager will manage and grow this function, helping codify our messaging and brand standards, producing key publications, supporting our leaders' thought leadership platforms, and moving our media presence from opportunistic to proactive. This is a role for a strategic executor who is also, emphatically, a doer: you will help set the strategy and oversee production and delivery of much of the work. You will be supported by designers on retainer, external PR counsel, freelancers you direct, an in-country communications officer, and an experienced writer on our Development team whose work you will help guide. You will also help maximize a brand and messaging engagement with a recently retained leading nonprofit brand strategy firm.

You will manage this function's day-to-day operations, working directly with the Chief of Staff and CEO. Our CEO has shaped our messaging to date and will continue to be a thought partner on strategy, voice, and positioning. Our Chief of Staff, a former nonprofit communications executive, supports the CEO on communications and will help you set priorities and navigate the organization.

Key Responsibilities

Executive Communications & Thought Leadership

• Work with the CEO to draft op-eds, speeches, presentations, and written pieces, positioning Healthy Learners as the leader in school health globally.
• Prepare leadership for panels, conferences, and sector dialogues with high-impact materials.
• As appropriate, support other organizational leaders with similar materials.

Strategic Communications & Brand

• Help create, implement and manage a comprehensive communications strategy aligned with Healthy Learners' mission and growth.
• Maintain key messaging, talking points, and boilerplate, ensuring consistent tone, visuals, and narrative across every channel and team.
• Keep our messaging current as the organization and the field evolve, so that how we tell our story stays authentic while speaking to the conversations that matter now.
• Manage a content calendar integrating organizational milestones, government engagements, donor cycles, and learning outputs.
• Own the annual speaking/event calendar, using HL's conference participation framework to select opportunities and track ROI against thought-leadership goals.

Publications & Collateral

• Collaborate to produce annual reports, and organizational collateral. Manage the process end to end: writing, editing, design direction, and production management.
• Direct external designers, photographers, and videographers to deliver high-quality outputs in line with our brand.
• Play an instrumental role in building the systems, production calendars, review processes, and templates that make excellent publications repeatable.

Media & Public Relations

• Help move Healthy Learners from opportunistic to proactive media engagement, identifying and managing external PR counsel to secure strategic placement.
• Create and support media moments around major milestones, launches, and evidence releases, and prepare our leaders with briefing materials for interviews and press opportunities.
• Work alongside our Advocacy and Government Engagement team where media and government relations meet, ensuring coverage advances our advocacy goals and always reflects the government-led nature of our work.
• Serve as the organization's first point of contact for incoming press inquiries, routing to the appropriate person.

Digital & Content

• Own the Healthy Learners online presence, ensuring timely, engaging, strategic content across our website and channels.
• Lead the capture of stories, photos, and video that bring our impact to life, in collaboration with field teams.
• Use analytics to sharpen strategy and extend reach.

Knowledge, Teams & Standards

• Work with M&E and Innovation teams to translate data and evidence into accessible learning products: briefs, infographics, and summaries that inform policy and the global health community.
• Strengthen how we communicate and share knowledge internally, with simple tools and templates that help teams document and share their work.
• Create and maintain quality standards and collaborate with our in-country communications officer and our Development team's writing lead.
• Partner with our Development team on donor materials, impact reporting, and campaign moments. Fundraising audiences are among our most important external audiences, so this is ongoing collaboration, not occasional support.

Skills & Qualifications

• At least 6-9 years of professional experience in strategic communications, public relations or content production, ideally in global health, education, or international development.
• Bachelor's degree in communications, journalism, public relations, or a related field; Master's degree a plus.
• A portfolio of flagship publications you personally produced end to end (work samples will be requested as part of the application).
• Demonstrated excellence in writing, editing, and storytelling for diverse audiences: donors, governments, media, and the public.
• Strong design sensibility: comfort with tools such as Canva or Adobe Suite and proven ability to direct professional designers.
• Strong project management skills, including managing freelancers, budgets, and multi-stakeholder review processes.
• Experience translating technical or programmatic information into accessible, compelling materials.
• Strong interpersonal skills and the ability to work collaboratively across teams and cultures.
• Deep commitment to Healthy Learners' mission.

What We Offer

• Opportunity for Impact: Play a pivotal role in implementing a program that improves health outcomes for millions of schoolchildren, shaping the future of communities across Africa.
• Competitive Compensation: