Programme Policy Officer – CBT Data Scientist

About WFP

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is the world's largest humanitarian agency fighting hunger worldwide.  The mission of WFP is to help the world achieve Zero Hunger in our lifetimes.  With more than 18,000 colleagues worldwide, WFP works to ensure that no child goes to bed hungry and that the poorest and most vulnerable, particularly women and children, can access the nutritious food they need.

Why WFP?

Over the last 10 years, WFP has become the leading global humanitarian international agency providing cash transfers to hungry people when crises strike and in development settings. Cash transfers currently account for almost 40 percent of WFP’s overall assistance, amounting to $2.1 billion in 2019 to 28 million people in 64 countries, accelerating progress towards ending hunger, and contributing to the achievement of other Sustainable Development Goals. With the arrival of the latest challenge, COVID 19, WFP has been working with to accelerate cash responses and assist governments with

WFP assisted more than 86 million people in 83 countries around the world in 2019. Your work will have a positive impact on lives of the world’s most vulnerable people

• WFP is Nobel Prize 2020 Laureate
• You will join a diverse team of professionals and will have a chance to exchange your experience with your colleagues
• WFP invests in the training and development of its employees through a range of training, accreditation, mentorship and other programs as well as through internal mobility opportunities
• Our team is growing internationally and the timing to join us cannot be better!
• We offer attractive compensation package (please refer to Terms and Conditions section)

WFP Cash-Based Transfers Division

Amid the challenges outlined above, WFP needs to ensure donor funds are reaching the right people at the right time with the appropriate systems in place to detect transaction and beneficiary anomalies. As such, the Cash-based Transfers (CBT) Division in the Programme and Policy Development Department is seeking a suitably qualified Data Scientist to be based in New York (there can be flexibility for the job holder to be based in locations within the Americas) as part of a distributed global team dedicated to building capacity to receive, store, process and analyse digital programme data to promote accountability, controls and efficiencies, and build stronger programme design.

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.

As one of WFP’s corporate objectives is to deliver assistance, either 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. The Data Scientist post is required to streamline digital analysis globally, including the tasks of receiving and maintaining large amounts of varied and unstructured operational data, processing and generating meaningful data analysis, while upholding data privacy and security standards. The Data Scientist will play a critical role in the distributed global CBT data analytics team, and specifically support data assurance in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC region).

The incumbent will join a highly capable multinational team dedicated to supporting global field support through the further development of digital assurance tools and intelligence to reinforce operational ecosystems.

The Role

Key Responsibilities

• Working with the CBT team and global stakeholders, provide analysis of business requirements and the implementation of solutions for data assurance.
• Oversee the implementation of a standard approach for transfer reconciliation (beneficiaries, transfers, payment instrument management).
• Introduce and apply best practices and advanced techniques to detect operational anomalies, triggering further review and fraud investigations.
• Disseminate and instill financial risk management concepts with analysts and senior management.
• Use data to inform narratives of programmatic activity and context.
• Develop professional reports with detailed analytical observations supported by data evidence, adopting clear and tactful language due to the sensitive content.
• Present analytical results to senior management (CDs, RDs, donors and other external audiences)
• Collaborate with senior engineers and architects to implement regular data cleaning, analysis and anomaly checks in reports and dashboards.
• Lead the adoption of approaches and techniques for trend analysis to promote assurances and programme effectiveness.
• Work with Country Offices to train/recruit local data analysts to perform selected analysis tasks in-country.
• Draft policies and guidelines on data assurance and risk mitigation best practices.
• Implement and clearly present data visualizations through data story-telling techniques, making key outputs of data analysis and sectorial assessments available to WFP decision-makers.
• Ensure audit trail of data transformations and end-to-end data governance.
• Apply data science, machine learning techniques, and probabilistic theory to beneficiary transfer anomaly detection and to beneficiary data deduplication, identifier generation and anonymization.
• Oversee junior analysts and interns from partnership universities in performing data analysis tasks.

• Experience (at least 5 years) working with large data sets and summarizing data for business.
• Familiarity with data warehousing and business intelligence concepts.
• Big data storing and retrieving skills on cloud platforms.
• Experience using visualization tools (preferably Tableau) and setting up dashboards.
• Ability to capture requirements and translate into insights.
• Familiarity with various ETL  tools is desirable.
• Advanced SQL  skills.
• Demonstrated experience with a reputable financial institution or financial regulator applying data science to risk analytics.
• Strong knowledge of Python and/or R.
• Statistical modeling/Machine learning.
• Strong ability to craft analysis independently.
• Experience with data assurance applications.
• Financial risk management certification is desirable.
• Ability to communicate with senior management and stakeholders.
• Mature judgement.
• Experience in working in a multicultural environment.
• Perform other duties as requested.

• A bachelor’s degree in quantitative discipline, such as science, technology, engineering, statistics, economics is required. Master’s degree in one of these disciplines is highly desirable
• Candidates with bachelor's and master's degrees in international relations, public policy and social sciences can be considered given they have successful demonstrated and relevant work experience in data science field.

• Someone who has the right disposition to help make a difference in the world.
• Intermediate knowledge (level B) of a second official UN language: Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and/or WFP’s working language, Portuguese