Clea Therese Finkle, Ph.D.

“She walked with us…”
Abdullahi Aden, Project Manager, Nomadic Health Project, Save the Children, Kenya

Clea had a long and varied professional career and thus a few short paragraphs can never adequately capture the scope and depth of her professional contributions. There are, however, a few key themes—or passions--that run through Clea’s work: these can be seen in the attached inventory of grants and projects (see Table X) she spearheaded during her career at the Gates Foundation.

The first theme is equity, and a concern for the most disenfranchised members of society. This shows perhaps most poignantly in her passion for finding ways to provide health services to nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples in Northern Kenya who had been all but forgotten by the formal health sector (see “Nomadic Health Project, 2017”). She worked closely with partners in Kenya to combine the best elements of service delivery with social behavior change to tailor services to this extremely hard to reach mobile population. But the equity theme also shows up in how carefully she approached problem identification and analysis: Clea provided the analysis and the strategic inputs that steered the Foundation’s first ever family planning strategy (2007) to focus on countries with the fastest growing urban populations where the needs of a poor, young population, many living in informal settlements, were rapidly outpacing the health systems’ ability to respond. She then worked on the design, launch and management of the flagship Urban Reproductive Health Initiative (URHI, 2010). One colleague recognized her contribution this way: “Clea took on a co-lead role for our strategy development work in a BIG way. Her resounding leadership, energy (and dance moves!) helped us make significant progress. She is an outstanding leader, collaborator, and colleague.”

The second theme is scale up, and especially sustainable scale up. Clea’s engagement in the design and management of the Urban Reproductive Health Initiative, led her to think critically about how one could build on the proven interventions under URHI while also addressing a key challenge of how to sustainably scale these interventions in new geographies. This gave birth to The Challenge Initiative (TCI, 2016)—the largest single Family Planning (FP) team investment of $66M/5 years. Clea is not only credited with the vision and bold thinking behind TCI, but it is also the investment of which she was most, and rightly, proud--TCI is still going strong today having engaged 185 local governments across 12 countries in scaling high impact interventions. Since its inception, a total of 3,762,918 additional family planning clients have been served in TCI geographies. She also worked to nurture a ‘scaling mindset’ on the FP team, developing and sharing a presentation on theories and frameworks for scaling effective programs, and she invested in a technical assistance mechanism to support FP team program officers to infuse scaling thinking into their investments (Technical Assistance for Scaling Solutions, ExpandNet, 2015), as well as funding and participating as an executive committee member on the global Community of Practice on Scaling Development Outcomes (MSI,2020). “It was a privilege to witness and benefit from her dedication, smarts, professionalism, intellectual curiosity, and commitment to making a difference.” Larry Cooley, Co-founder and Co-chair, Scale Up Community of Practice.

The third theme is rigor: she was rigorous in her thinking as well as her practice. Clea understood the importance of having clear goals and measurable outcomes, and she often said that a good ‘results framework’ was the most important part of the project document, as it laid the foundation for thoughtful project design, implementation, and evaluation. And she worked hard to ensure that her grantees had the support they needed to set a clear course, measure their progress, and evaluate their impact. As a result, the projects she managed always had strong evaluation components and were able to not only assess ultimate outcomes but measure progress, and course correct, along the way. Further, she was passionate about having the data both generated and used by those closest to the problem—although a savvy mathematician and statistician, she believed that the fanciest statistical models or the most expensive data collection activities were of no value if the results were not useful for, and used by, policy makers and program planners on the ground. This was part of the impetus behind the 5 year Elevating Urban Family Planning Project (IUSSP, 2018) which recruited and mentored early and mid-career scientists from the global south in conducting policy relevant research on family planning in urban contexts.

Although this is not something Clea ever explicitly acknowledged, looking back at the body of Clea’s work at the Foundation, it is clear that she was actively working to shift power to local actors—both in terms of what she invested in and how she invested. Her ideas emerged from careful analysis and research and were honed through conversations and observations with her colleagues at the Foundation but especially with her colleagues in the field. Her focus on sustainable scale led her to always work with others in country, to prioritize local organizations’ and actors’ perspectives--encouraging, coaching, asking tough questions, staying open and flexible, integrating new information—knowing that their ownership of the problem, and the solution, was critical to sustainable scale. And sustainable scale mattered to her—impact was not enough: unless the system was transformed, unless those in the system and those driving the system were transformed, impact would be fleeting, and that, for Clea, was simply not good enough.

The story of Clea’s professional life is best told, however, by those who had the good fortune to work with her over the years. They speak of how compassionate, caring and kind she was, how collaborative, curious, inspiring, humble, smart, and insightful she was. They mention her guidance to “fail fast and fail forward” which created an “environment in which the team was constantly learning and adapting”, and was comfortable sharing when things weren’t going so well. But mostly they talk of her keen respect for them as partners on a journey that she cared about deeply.

“She walked with us”, said one Kenyan colleague, “throughout the project lifespan and her energy inspired us all the time.” She worked with her grantees from proposal design to project implementation, as a thought partner, coach, mentor, colleague, champion, and critical friend. “Her support and counsel and friendship made us who we are” said Rob Burnett, CEO of Shujaaz, a youth multimedia program in Kenya. Another colleague remembered her humility: As we prepared our International Conference on Family Planning 2018 session in Rwanda, Clea did not sit back as a project donor…but jumped in to help review content as well as organizing the tables…She was humble, team oriented, and sought to make the results better for those we served in Kenya.” Nana Apenem Hanson-Hall, Nomadi Health Project, Kenya.

She was a two-time winner of the FP Team’s Culture Champion Award for intellectual rigor and courageous inquiry. In her nominations her colleagues noted: “Clea asks the tough questions. She keeps us honest…She knows the literature and connects data and strategic thinking in a way that challenges us to build on existing knowledge, rather than "re-invent the wheel." Another said, “Clea does a great job of asking challenging questions that push the team's thinking. She is humble and respectful and is a complete joy to work with.”
Yes, she was humble and she was respectful, but she also had not a small amount of mischief in her. For example, she founded the “Varsity Team”--an unofficial, unorthodox, team of FP and FP-adjacent program officers who met irregularly with no set agenda to discuss and debate ideas, and sometimes to raise their collective voice—Varsity was highly suspect! Her Varsity colleagues honored her with a Varsity letter in 2021: In honor of her inspiration and vision in founding the FP Varsity team, and in recognition of her years of dedicated service to making it a place where we could share ideas, struggles, and truffle popcorn, occasionally voice our frustrations, and always come together in love and support to further the work we all care so deeply about.
Her energy was legendary, as were her questions. In almost every team meeting, she would raise her pen, and tilt her head, and in a soft but clear voice ask a probing and insightful question. Or sometimes she would simply crack a joke. She was very funny. And that too was part of what made her so effective as a program officer, as a colleague, and as an advocate for the things she cared about. She was immensely human, warm and witty, open and forgiving…she wanted the world to work, for everyone, and she gave it everything she had to make it so.