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Midori de Habich brings 25 years of experience leading and implementing development activities in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), including two years serving as Minister of Health, and 10 years as a Chief of Party of USAID-funded projects in her native country of Peru.de Habich is the technical director for the Abt-led, USAID-financed Local Health System Sustainability Project (LHSS), which supports government efforts to improve access to quality care for poor, underserved, and socially excluded populations in LMICs. de Habich helps country teams to think creatively about new solutions and approaches. She ensures that the project’s collaborative approach to working with local government partners is applied wherever LHSS works. She also oversees the global technical expert pool, coordinates cross-project learning, and is responsible for the quality assurance of technical approaches and major project deliverables.

Maureen Ogada-Ndekana has more than 14 years of experience bolstering health systems in the east African region. She has expertise in public-private engagement, health markets development, social enterprise marketing, health project management, and policy advocacy for health. She has played leading roles in several U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) projects, including Local Health Systems Sustainability (LHSS) and the global flagship private sector initiative, Sustaining Health Outcomes through the Private Sector (SHOPS) Plus, in Tanzania. She helped accelerate progress toward Tanzania’s health goals by unlocking the potential of the private sector markets for sexual and reproductive health and HIV commodities.

Mbogo Bunyi is a development professional with more than 20 years of experience working in global health and private sector engagement in East Africa. As a technical advisor, he has worked closely with national and sub-national governments, corporations, and development partners to improve health outcomes. He has facilitated key public-private partnerships to overcome obstacles to private-sector participation, building stronger health markets for family planning and HIV in Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda. Bunyi has supported innovative solutions in health financing, private investment for social enterprises, and health care policy.

Katharine Witgert is a health policy researcher with 20 years of public health and health care policy experience. Witgert manages research and analysis of health system innovations, conducting program evaluations for federal clients, including design, implementation, and reporting of findings. She provides technical assistance to state officials, primarily in the areas of Medicaid reforms and building Medicaid agency partnerships with public health, behavioral health, and social services programs.

Bettina Brunner is an international health professional bringing more than 19 years of professional experience working in HIV and AIDS, family planning and reproductive health. She focuses on private sector engagement, program management, private health sector assessments, public-private partnerships in health, health systems strengthening, technical management and grant writing. She has extensive experience working for the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Bank and is a specialist in West Africa. She has developed and tested policy tools, particularly tools for engaging the private health sector.

Jane Pepperall is a senior health professional with over 30 years of experience in global health policy development and in supporting national health sector development in the Pacific, Asia, and Africa. She has focused on strategy and investments to strengthen health systems and health financing. Jane worked for the United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID) (now the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office) for 20 years, including health adviser postings in Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Pakistan, and the Pacific. More recently she has been providing health strategy, policy, and technical advice to the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT).

Benny Kil is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and a certified scrum master (CSM) with over 15 years of project and product management experience—working in business analysis and project delivery in the federal, state, and commercial areas with a focus on technology and digital processes. He has experience in leading multidisciplinary teams to deliver client requirements using agile methodologies (scrum and kanban). He is an experienced leader who can provide IT project and portfolio management oversight through the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC), including client management, business requirements elicitation, IT software development, quality assurance (QA)/quality control (QC), testing, and deployment. Kil has led projects with a variety of federal clients, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Dr. Josephat Shililu is a senior project manager and entomologist with over 20 years’ experience managing malaria control programs and conducting malaria vectors’ research. He has extensive expertise in project planning and implementation and has contributed to successful and timely implementation of IRS projects in Uganda, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Kenya. He has also contributed to Ministries of Health (MOH’s) capacity strengthening efforts in malaria research, environmental compliance procedures, logistics systems, and mobilization campaigns. Dr. Shililu has ensured sound financial management and timely completion of quality project technical and financial deliverables.

Laurent Nkera Iyikirenga is a biologist, medical entomologist, teacher, and public health professional with 24 years of experience working in vector control. He has contributed to large-scale projects that include increasing national capacities to collect, analyze, and use entomological data to inform malaria prevention and control programs. He has worked with malaria-control authorities in Rwanda, Burundi, Benin, and Sierra Leone.

Désiré A. Boko is a primary care provider with more than three decades of healthcare experience, including extensive work in health system strengthening with U.S. government-funded projects. He has served as chief of party (COP) in fragile state settings in an environment of crisis and insecurity, including Mali and Haiti. He provides technical leadership and managerial oversight in the implementation of project strategy for such areas as health financing, health sector reform, human resources, and decentralization.