Data Scientist Consultant
WFP celebrates and embraces diversity. It is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunity for all its employees and
encourages qualified candidates to apply irrespective of race, color, national origin, ethnic or social background, genetic information,
gender, gender identity and/or expression, sexual orientation, religion or belief, HIV status, physical or mental disability.
Job Title: Data Scientist
Type of Contract: Regular Consultant level I
Division: CBT / Cash-Based Transfers Division
Duty Station (City, Country): Munich, Germany
Duration: 11 months
BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE OF THE ASSIGNMENT:
The United Nations World Food Programme is the world's largest humanitarian agency fighting hunger worldwide. The mission of WFP is to help the world achieve Zero Hunger. Every day, WFP works to ensure that nobody goes to bed hungry and that the poorest and most vulnerable, particularly women and children, are able to meet their food and other essential needs.
The Cash-Based Transfer (CBT) Division in HQ has been tasked with leading on WFP’s corporate systems and services for WFP’s in-kind and CBT programmes. CBT intends to support WFP Country Offices to deliver assistance to beneficiaries through a variety of digital platforms and service providers. WFP works in partnership with several commercial Financial Service Providers (FSPs), including banks, micro-finance institutions, mobile money operators and money transfer agents, in addition to using WFP’s own delivery platform, SCOPE.
One of WFP’s corporate objectives is to increasingly deliver assistance, either cash-based transfer (CBT) or in-kind, through digital means, and register beneficiaries digitally, in order to achieve greater efficiencies and provide greater accountability and traceability of assistance delivered.
Therefore, WFP seeks to build its corporate capacity to centrally receive, store, process and analyse digital operational data for the purpose of promoting accountability, controls and efficiencies as part of cash-based transfer. There is also the opportunity to better inform WFP’s programme design through the analysis of digital data emanating from operations.
The WFP Cash Assurance Framework introduces a set of standard controls, including data analytics, reconciliation, and anomaly checks. To support WFP field offices in the achievement of the Cash Assurance Framework objectives, a “Cash Data Service” has been established within the CBT division. In order to oversee the implementation of detective controls for cash operations, adopting industry best practices and innovative approaches, the Cash Data Services is recruiting a Data Scientist to be based in its office in Munich.
JOB PURPOSE
Adopt data science techniques to support field offices with the analysis of data anomalies, data quality, and people list deduplication, providing professional reports, dashboards, and creating automations for the regular execution of controls.
ACCOUNTABILITIES / RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Become familiar with WFP’s Cash Assurance Framework and Identity Management, in order to make data assurance assessments and offer expert advice to field offices to address assurance gaps.
- Analyse business requirements and implement data transformation pipelines to implement controls, with particular focus on transfers reconciliation and anomaly detection.
- Provide technical specifications to data engineers to automate the execution of scripts and reports.
- Support the adoption of data science approaches in CBT to address assurance objectives, working with data scientists from academic and private partner institutions.
- Apply data-science techniques to detect operational anomalies, triggering further review and fraud investigations.
- Develop algorithms to perform beneficiary data deduplication, unique identifier generation and sensitive data anonymization.
- Develop professional reports, dashboards, and presentations with detailed analytical observations supported by data evidence, adopting clear and tactful language due to the sensitive content.
- Present analytical results to business stakeholders, WFP senior management, and external audiences.
- Work with Country Offices to train/recruit local data analysts to perform selected analysis and CBT assurance tasks in-country.
- Perform any other duties as required.
QUALIFICATIONS AND EXPERIENCE REQUIRED:
Education:
A bachelor’s or master’s degree in Data Science, Statistics, Computer Science or Economics.
Experience:
At least 3 years’ experience with different approaches and techniques for data analytics and data science.
Knowledge and Skills:
Ability to effectively engage and coordinate across a variety of stakeholders. Knowledge and experience with Agile methodologies is desirable.
Good communicator (verbal and written) across different stakeholders within the organization. Previous experience in approaches for reconciliation and anomaly detection for cash- based transfers is considered a distinct advantage.
Ability to capture requirements and translate into insights.
Solid SQL and Python/pandas skills.
Languages:
Fluency (level C) in English with an intermediate knowledge of another official UN language (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish) or Portuguese (one of WFP’s working languages) is desirable.
Terms and Conditions
WFP offers a competitive compensation package which will be determined by the contract type and selected candidate’s qualifications and experience.
Please visit the following websites for detailed information on working with WFP.
http://www.wfp.org Click on: “Our work” and “Countries” to learn more about WFP’s operations.
Deadline for applications: 03 July 2023
Ref.: VA No. 827887
All employment decisions are made on the basis of organizational needs, job requirements, merit, and individual qualifications. WFP is committed to providing an
inclusive work environment free of sexual exploitation and abuse, all forms of discrimination, any kind of harassment, sexual harassment, and abuse of authority.
Therefore, all selected candidates will undergo rigorous reference and background checks.
No appointment under any kind of contract will be offered to members of the UN Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions (ACABQ), International
Civil Service Commission (ICSC), FAO Finance Committee, WFP External Auditor, WFP Audit Committee, Joint Inspection Unit (JIU) and other similar bodies within the
United Nations system with oversight responsibilities over WFP, both during their service and within three years of ceasing that service.
