Duty Station: Addis Ababa
Deadline: 06 March 2023
Job Description
Result of Service
The consultant will help in help in the organization of meetings, contribute to the reporting and the other activities of the Africa Regional hub on big data and data science, help design and run hackathons and other data science activities, prepare webinars and other presentations, and do other data science related activities as required.
Work Location
Addis Ababa
Expected duration
9 months
Duties and Responsibilities
Background:
At its 45th session, the United Nations Statistical Commission voted to establish a UN Committee of Experts on Big Data and Data Science for Official Statistics (UN-CEBD) to further examine the benefits and challenges of Big Data, particularly the potential for monitoring and reporting on the SDGs. In this context, the UN-CEBD and the wider official statistical community recognized the importance of adequately addressing issues such as methodology, quality, technology, data access, legislation, privacy, management, and finance, as well as providing adequate cost-benefit analyses for the use of Big Data. To make this modernization endeavor more accessible and inclusive, four Regional Hubs for Big Data were established in 2020 and 2021 in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro), China (Hangzhou), Rwanda (Kigali), and the United Arab Emirates (Dubai).
These centers were mandated to encourage creative initiatives, exchange methodologies, algorithms, and tools, and teach the local community of official statisticians on Big Data and data science. The Regional Hubs will host international conferences and workshops on data science and the modernization of official statistics.
The National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda (NISR) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa are collaborating to support the UN Global Platform Regional Hub for Africa. The collaboration was formalized by a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA). The Regional Hub for Africa was established with the objective of:
a) investigating the advantages and disadvantages of Big Data,
b) monitoring and report on long-term development goals
c) successfully enhancing official statistics with Big Data
In addition, the 2022 session of the Statistical Commission for Africa stressed the importance of modernization of statistical systems and the recent Internet Government Forum that took place in Addis Ababa in 2022 also recognized that the statistical development momentum Africa has achieved in recent years must be sustained by enhanced data governance, transformational leadership, acquisition of new skills and knowledge including data science, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning, to realize the new data ecosystems and unlock Africa’s full data potential.
As a result of the increase in demand for data, traditional National Statistical Systems are no longer able to cope, which is why National Statistical Systems need to be modernized and transformed. It is now imperative to transform traditional data flows into broad data ecosystems that encompass the entire value chain of data, driven by national priorities and supported by the Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics outlined in the African Charter on Statistics, the Strategy for Harmonization of Statistics in Africa (SHaSA), and other existing policy frameworks.
In line with these modernization efforts, the data science programme of the African Centre for Statistics of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa is exploring new and innovative ways to produce statistics using big data and data science and accompanying African national statistical systems in learning and applying such methodologies.
The African Centre for Statistics is planning to work in 2023 on the following workstreams in data science:
– Use of alternative data sources (web scraping, satellite images, mobile phone data, etc.) to help in the production of various socio-economic indicators, including alternative well-being and beyond GDP indicators.
– Development of machine learning powered systems to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and experiences between countries with a pilot project in the production of economic statistics (a chatbot combined with a system for matching queries with relevant records in a knowledge base). In the long term, the systems will facilitate knowledge integration in area where such integration is needed but still very challenging, by tapping into the possibilities opened by the recent advances of data science research in language understanding and question answering.
– Generating datasets and training machine learning algorithms to classify economic regimes (different economic models’ outcomes) to improve inference in the production of economic statistics.
– Dialogue with African countries on data governance issues, the ethics of Artificial Intelligence and the risk arising from systematic biases in the data used to train AI algorithms with special focus on the issues that may arise in the African context, the role of national statistical systems in the quality control and the ethical validation of datasets used to train artificial intelligence algorithms, discussions on new data sharing mechanisms and the alignment of the continental and international frameworks and guidelines to tape into the opportunities offered by big data and data science while respecting privacy and other ethical considerations, in synergy with the ACS workstream about the modernization of national statistical systems.
– Production of data analytics pipelines to support the data needs of ECA’s various publications.
– Any other relevant work in the areas of the governance and / or use of data science and machine learning to improve the production of official statistics that may arise as a priority work from the discussions with member countries.
Duties and responsibilities:
Under the overall supervision of the Director, African centre for Statistics and the direct supervision of the statistician in charge of data science related workstream, the consultant is expected to perform the following tasks:
– Support to the organization of the regular meetings of the Africa Regional Hub on Big Data, Data science cafés and Data Science and the other data science related meetings of ACS.
– Help in the supervision of young data scientist in various data science project and in the production of quality datasets for training machine learning algorithms.
– Help in the production of reports and presentation on big data, data science and machine learning.
– Help in the development of data analytics pipelines to support the data needs of ECA’s various publications
– Assist in the preparation and execution of data science hackathons and data science webinars.
– Contribute to various data science projects, code testing and supervision of other data scientists working on other data science projects.
– Assist ACS in creating and maintaining a GitHub repository of code.
– Assist in maintaining the dialogue with African countries on data governance issues, the ethics of Artificial Intelligence and the risk arising from systematic biases in the data used to train AI algorithms with special focus on the issues that may arise in the African context, the role of national statistical systems in the quality control and the ethical validation of datasets used to train artificial intelligence algorithms, discussions on new data sharing mechanisms and the alignment of the continental and international frameworks and guidelines to tape into the opportunities offered by big data and data science while respecting privacy and other ethical considerations, in synergy with the ACS workstream about the modernization of national statistical systems.
– Assist in any other data science related activity as requested.
Qualifications/special skills
- Advanced university degree (Master’s degree or equivalent) in a field related to ICT (Computer science, Data science, Statistics, Information systems, or related) is required.
- A first-level university degree, in combination with two years of qualifying experience, may be accepted in lieu of the advanced university degree.
- A minimum of 3 years of practical experience in data science is required
Knowledge of developing countries and issues related to statistical development, SDGs and Agenda 2063 is required
- Good communication, presentation and writing skills are required
- Excellent drafting and analytical skills are required
- Good understanding and use of the following tools is a plus: R, Python, MySQL, HTML, CSS, SQL, JQuery, JavaScript, JSON, Web services/APIs; GitHub, Visual Studio Code are desirable.
Languages
- English and French are the working languages of the United Nations Secretariat. For the consultancy advertised, fluency in English is required.
- Knowledge of the other is an advantage. Knowldege of another UN Official language is an asset.
No Fee
THE UNITED NATIONS DOES NOT CHARGE A FEE AT ANY STAGE OF THE RECRUITMENT PROCESS (APPLICATION, INTERVIEW MEETING, PROCESSING, OR TRAINING). THE UNITED NATIONS DOES NOT CONCERN ITSELF WITH INFORMATION ON APPLICANTS’ BANK ACCOUNTS.