Data Analyst Consultant

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE OF THE ASSIGNMENT:

WFP country offices 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.

Several challenges exist in streamlining digital analysis globally, including the tasks of receiving and maintaining massive amounts of varied and unstructured operational data, processing and generating meaningful analysis of data, while ensuring that data privacy and security standards are upheld. The Data Assurance Team within Programme division has established a cloud-based data management system to meet data assurance needs in performing reconciliation and analysis on operational data.

Several challenges exist in streamlining digital analysis globally, including the tasks of receiving and maintaining massive amounts of varied and unstructured operational data, processing and generating meaningful analysis of data, while ensuring that data privacy and security standards are upheld. The Data Assurance Team within Programme division has established a cloud-based data management system to meet data assurance needs in performing reconciliation and performing analysis on operational data.

To achieve the objectives outlined above, WFP is recruiting a Data Engineer to be part of the Data Assurance team established in the CBT Division, to provide support to WFP’s CBT operations globally.

ACCOUNTABILITIES/RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Become familiar with WFP’s CBT assurance framework and in general with WFP’s CBT business processes and strategy, with particular focus on data aspects, in order to make assurance assessments, provide contextual business-focused analysis, and offer expert advice to field offices to address assurance maturity gaps.
• Working with the central CBT teams and field-level stakeholders, analyse business requirements and implement technical solutions and reports for data assurance, with particular focus on beneficiary transfers reconciliation and anomaly detection.
• Provide technical specifications to data engineers to implement regular data transformation pipelines for data cleaning, reconciliation, and anomaly checks.
• 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.
• Draft guidelines on data assurance, service agreements, and risk mitigation best practices.
• Collaborate with data-science researchers from academic partner institutions and oversee interns temporarily assigned to the team as data analysts.
• Perform any other duties as required.

QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE REQUIRED: