People, Operations & Movement Coordinator

About MAMA Network

Mobilizing Activists around the Medical Abortion Network is a collaboration of grassroots activists and feminist groups based in Sub-Saharan Africa, seeking to expand access to safe Medical Abortion.

MAMA is a regional movement working to share evidence-based and stigma-free information about self-managed medical abortion and sexual and reproductive health and rights directly with women at the community level. MAMA membership is currently 74 groups in 24 African countries, with plans to deepen our impact and expand our reach over the next years.

We are feminist activists, trained counselors and researchers based across the African continents who have a strong focus on supporting self-managed abortion, especially in places where abortion is restricted by laws, stigma, and lack of access. MAMA strategies include (a) Hotlines that provide information (b) Community outreach programs (c) Pharmacy and healthcare provider collaboration (d) Advocacy for decriminalisation of abortion and (e) Partnerships with feminist groups around the world to support increased access to abortion pills.

The MAMA Coordination Team leads the planning, implementation, reporting and improvement of our strategies and various programs and contributes to the building and administration of the movement.

Learn more: www.mamanetwork.org

About the Role

The People, Operations and Movement Coordinator provides operational leadership to ensure the network’s governance, people systems, workplans, operations, and strategy work in alignment to advance the movement’s mission.

At a pivotal moment of MAMA’s evolution, you will steer the roll-out of our new governance model and strengthen coordination across bodies. You will ensure all our systems and processes are co-created with the team, reflect the network’s feminist values of collaboration, trust and horizontality and align deeply with our grassroot activist nature, while supporting the achievement of our strategic objectives.

This role works to connect the dots between governance, strategy, finance, and day-to-day operations so that the network functions effectively and can respond to opportunities and challenges with clarity and coherence. Your success means the interconnected parts of our growing movement are well organized and moving forward.

Your Responsibilities will include

Spearhead the Network’s Governance

Lead the roll-out of MAMA’s new governance structure, including setting up new governing bodies and strengthening the movement coordination.

Lead the setting up of the Support and Accountability Council (SAAC) and All Members Council.

Lead the process of recruiting an additional coordinating organisation.

Coordinate the onboarding and orientation of the new Coordinating Organisation and SAAC members.

Coordinate the development and implementation of governance policies, TORs, and related documents.

Manage MAMA’s governance operations, including coordinating meetings, retreats, evaluations, All Members Council and SAAC sessions.

Track action points and follow up on decisions across governance structures, ensuring documentation, compliance (minutes, decisions, resolutions, approvals), and effective communication between governance bodies (SAAC, Coordination Team, All Members Council, Working Groups).

Organize and synthesize SAAC and Council materials for review and learning.

Support the evaluation of the governance structure’s functioning and effectiveness of the different bodies to strengthen network accountability and governance practice in MAMA.

Spearhead our People & Culture Processes

Oversee efforts to build a strong MAMA Coordinators team, including recruitment, onboarding, capacity building, teambuilding, culture, and connection initiatives, as well as managing any consultants or team members supporting these activities.

Oversee the design, implementation and iteration of relevant strategies & systems for capacity development, teambuilding, connection and care, etc

Spearhead the development and implementation of our team accountability tools, including a performance management framework incorporating 360-degree feedback.

Ensure our decision making process is effectively applied in team decisions and is over time built out into a comprehensive decision making policy.

Lead the development and implementation of a comprehensive remuneration structure, ensuring alignment with the network’s goals, industry standards, equitable compensation practices, and adherence to feminist principles of fairness, transparency, and inclusivity.

Ensure any team/admin related policies are documented and communicated across the team.

Spearhead recruitment and onboarding of new coordinators, ensuring they are set up for success.

Operations Oversight

Overall coordination of all organizational & programmatic operations, ensuring alignment of workplans, program activities and timelines.

Lead our annual review and planning and the quarterly workplan reviews.

Define and roll-out internal routines, processes and systems to boost effectiveness and efficiency of our operations.

Oversee MAMA Coordinators’ workload and contributions to ensure tasks are balanced and resources are effectively allocated.

Overall oversight for all our grant reporting timelines & deliverables. Ensuring implementation and compliance of grants (grants are assigned per person).

Coordinate our Strategy and Finance Processes

Co-Lead the annual budgeting process, fostering alignment to strategic priorities.

Host Quarterly Finance Meetings, facilitating team decisions on re-allocations in line with strategic priorities and ensuring follow-up.

Provide guidance for complex financial decisions within MAMA, ensuring that decisions requiring final approval are aligned with organizational goals and financial sustainability, while upholding a transparent and accountable decision-making process.

Preparing MOUs between MAMA coordinating organizations for operational expenses.

Lead MAMA’s strategy refinement, including development of the 2027–2032 Strategic Plan and facilitation of mid-term reviews. Select and collaborate with a strong consultant to design and implement a values-aligned methodology.

Facilitate team dialogues to ensure clarity on strategic direction, goals, and outcomes, aligned with broader network and governance discussions.

Ensure mission alignment in the team.

Spearhead conversations to ensure our programs are rooted in organizational history, programmatic experience, and learning, while responding innovatively to internal and external needs.

Coordinate a partnership development process in which coordinators assess and align partnership leads with strategy, ensuring clear objectives and mission alignment across all MAMA collaborations.

Who we are looking for:

Passionate and deep commitment to MAMA’s mission of building a feminist movement to bring transformative change in abortion rights and access in Africa. You have a sense of urgency around SRHR as a justice issue.

You deeply understand networks, membership organizations or coalitions, how they are governed and what makes them thrive, ideally in a feminist or activist context in Africa. You are excited to work with grassroot activists and organizations with varying realities, stages of growth, cultures, languages, etc.

You are energized by enabling others to thrive and are known for bringing out the best in individuals, teams, and groups. Service-oriented by nature, you excel in playing a behind-the-scenes role that strengthens the collective.

You believe in co-creative and collaborative leadership, collective decision making and peer accountability, and you have vast practical understanding of what brings these concepts to life in teams.

You have at least 7-10 years of relevant experience with the following key competencies:

Human-Centered Process Design: You design and implement efficient, goal-driven systems that center people’s real needs. You create values-aligned, accountable, and non-bureaucratic team and organizational processes, and effectively guide external consultants to deliver in alignment with strategy and core values.

Systems Thinking: You naturally see how people, teams, and processes connect within a bigger ecosystem. You design solutions that address root causes, consider interdependencies and ripple effects, and support long-term, sustainable impact.

Operations Leadership: You have coordinated a wide range of organizational processes, including People (recruitment, performance management, capacity development, team culture and care, etc), and Operations (annual review, learning and planning cycle, workplan tracking, team meetings and retreats, etc) successfully in a virtual team environment.

Strong Facilitation: You have a track record in guiding collective conversations, reflections and processes. You ensure all voices are heard, consensus is found, new ideas are birthed, and strategy-aligned decisions are taken – building on your toolbox of moderation and facilitation techniques.

Excellent Coordination: Demonstrated ability to translate collective decisions into clear next steps and ensuring follow-through and action tracking in a busy team without top-down control. You have clear written communication, incl. documentation and synthesis.

Strategic Leadership: You have been involved in the strategic management of organizations or networks, including the design, implementation and review of mid-term Strategic Plans, ideally participatory or co-created processes.

Financial Management: You have worked with budgets, grants, and financial decision-making at an organizational or network level. While finance training is not required, analytical thinking and affinity to spreadsheets is crucial.

You are deeply relational, know how to build trust, practice active listening, and honour different realities.

You lead with your feminist values, understand power and context.

You are highly organized, keep timelines moving and value structure, but adapt with agility when needed.

You have high personal effectiveness in remote working and working across timezones, with high tech affinity and understanding of remote team tools.

Why work with us

Join our mission to continue saving lives, contributing to autonomy in reproductive health decisions and shifting power away from the formal medical system to women and other pregnant people.

We develop and implement cutting edge strategies to put abortion and contraception access and support directly in the hands of those in need.

Be part of a skilled multinational feminist team that values power-sharing and applies a horizontal working model.

Collaborate with and support feminist activists across Africa and globally.

Other information and How to Apply

This is a full-time, remote-working role. We are flexible regarding the candidate’s location, as long as the candidate is able to accommodate typical working hours for meetings with team and members in the African timezones. This role will be contracted via consulting agreement.

Submit your application by filling the below form.

Recruitment is carried out in collaboration with edge. All communication regarding this role will come from email addresses in the domains @edgeperformance.co.ke and @mamanetwork.org