Richard Johnson
CEO
Richard is the full-time CEO of HBGI.
Mental health has run as a theme through much of his work of the last 23 years, striving to enable socially excluded people to secure and sustain independence and healthy lives. He uses contracting and performance management to connect spending better with delivery, in order to give the service users a better, more individual and locally relevant, outcomes-focused response.
At HBGI he is bringing together an exciting, performance-focused, global team to challenge the tired delivery (and wasted funding) of so many national and international systems and institutions, to deliver more meaningful outcomes for more vulnerable people limited by poor mental health (and social exclusion).
Richard spent two years as a Senior Advisor for the Global Fund (HIV, TB and malaria). He mobilized a number of projects, including: incentivizing informal medicine vendors to extend malaria testing and treatment in rural areas of Nigeria; introducing incentives to increase TB reporting by private pharmacies in the Philippines, and; linking the payments of community health workers to their performance to increase HIV treatment adherence in Niger.
He worked for nearly ten years as a Senior Consultant for the World Bank. Until the resurgence of the Taliban, he was supporting the Ministry of Public Health in Afghanistan with the management of contracted health services in which service provider payments were tied to the delivery of key health interventions. Other projects, across a number of countries, have included: linking refugees with jobs in Ethiopia, and; designing and mobilising outcomes-based job intermediation for long-term unemployed people in Saudi Arabia.
He continues to oversee and advise on the delivery of social impact programs. He is Chair of a youth employment Development Impact Bond in Palestine and a similar Social Impact Bond in South Africa. He has previously chaired nine Social Impact Bonds in the UK, which targeted homelessness, care for carers and refugees.
Previously, Richard set up and ran a series of high-performing private employment service providers in the UK under contract with the government there – paid on the basis of outcomes. His last contract was worth £750 million over seven years, assisting long-term unemployed people, many of whom had poor mental health, to find employment.
Previously Richard had established one of the first Employment Zones – the first large scale outcome-based contracts in the UK – in an area of chronically high deprivation. He worked as an advisor to service providers in Australia, assisting people with disabilities to secure jobs. He was a Specialist Advisor to the UK government’s Work and Pensions Select Committee.
Richard had an early career in international education (in Sudan, Northern Cyprus, Greece and the UK). He studied Philosophy and Psychology at Oxford University and Applied Linguistics at Exeter University.