Vulnerability Analysis & Mapping Officer (Data Scientist) at World Food Programme (WFP)

Requisition ID:159181

Contract Type: Fixed Term

Job Purpose

• To contribute to the VAM evidence base that supports food security and nutrition policies and programmes (e.g. needs assessment and situation analyses, programme design, targeting, cost effectiveness, and operational efficiency).

Key Accountabilities (Not all-inclusive)

• Contribute to the development of VAM projects and activities, plans and processes, ensuring alignment with wider WFP policies and guidance.
• Support the development of systems and tools for the monitoring and assessment of food assistance needs in line with innovative methodologies and best practice.
• Support the development of food security and vulnerability analysis and the preparation of timely reports on food assessment needs in line with wider VAM policies, processes and guidance to enable effective decision-making on the development of country strategy, policies and programmes.
• Provide assistance on the coordination of data gathering and monitoring systems ensuring that rigorous quality standards are maintained.
• Liaise with implementing partners (internal and external) to monitor ongoing projects, ensuring effective collaboration, timeliness and efficiency and highlight potential risks to project delivery.
• Support the capacity building of WFP staff, partners and national government to conduct vulnerability analysis to effectively inform preparedness and response activities.
• Provide support to relevant partners that are focusing on food security and nutrition issues to enable sharing of experience, lessons learned and best practice.
• Guide and supervise more junior staff, acting as a point of referral and supporting them with analysis and queries.
• Act in an assigned emergency response capacity as required to meet emergency food assistance needs.
• Other as required.

Standard Minimum Qualifications

• Education: Advanced University Degree in Economics, Food Security, Statistics, Data Science, Public Health / Nutrition, Geography or other related field, or First University Degree with additional years of related work experience and/or training/courses.
• Experience: Minimum three (3) years post-graduate work experience in applied data science/statistics to humanitarian/development programming, demography, quantitative research, or monitoring & evaluation.
• National Professional: Fluency (level C) in the English language.

Other Specific Job Requirements (details to be determined by Hiring Managers):

• Perform data mining, processing, analysis, reporting and visualization tasks for a wide range of food security and other relevant data collected in Nigeria;
• Support standardisation and automation efforts on data quality monitoring and analysis to enable faster data processing, real time data quality monitoring;
• Work closely with country office staff to identify and design data visualisation and data architecture needs for the in-country data visualisation platform;
• Support the development of the mVAM methodology in Nigeria, focusing specifically on data quality aspects, bias correction, analysis of trends and the production of automated reports.

Desired Knowledge and Skills for Entry into the Role:

• Proven knowledge of applied statistics and statistics packages (R, SQL, SPSS, etc.);
• Proven knowledge of programming skills in R and Python;
• Experience with mobile data collection tools desirable;
• Experience with analysis in food security, nutrition and/or human development highly desirable;
• Strong client orientation;
• Strong report writing skills desirable;
• Ability to communicate and present abstract subject matter to non-technical audiences;
• Experience with WFP systems a distinct advantage.