Data Scientist / Statistician - Food and Nutrition Systems (International Consultant) at Scofield Associates

Scofield Associates is a research company providing research products to development partners across the Horn of Africa. We are the Horn of Africa Research Partner, promoting justice, economic opportunity, and human dignity using data. We work with local institutions and development partners to advance public understanding of data, and its use for good in development. In collaboration with our in-country partners, we support research and program designs that are responsive to local needs and that prioritize sustainable solutions to pressing development challenges.

We are recruiting to fill the position below:

Job Title: Data Scientist / Statistician - Food and Nutrition Systems (International Consultant)

Location: Nigeria
Category: Monitoring and Evaluation

Program: Assessing the Food Security and Nutrition Needs and Priorities

• Scofield Associates will be submitting an evaluation partner proposal for an upcoming Food Security and Nutrition Program.
• The Evaluation partner will play the role of a thought partner through the life of the programme (4 - 5 years), providing leadership on best practices for rigorous evaluations of complex multi-country projects while considering the evaluation approaches, contextual realities, and programmatic experiences in the upcoming program.

The program’s goal will be:

• To improve food security and contribute to the reduction of malnutrition of at least 5 million women of reproductive age and children in Benin, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Mozambique.
• The program will also include two strategic objectives:
  • Increase access to and consumption of healthy diets.
  • Increase the resilience of nutritional situations to price and climate change-related shocks and stresses of household members across the six countries, with a focus on women of reproductive age and children.

Job Description

• To this end, Scofield Associates is looking for International Consultants with specialities in data science, statistics and analytics.
• Some experience working with food and nutrition systems in the horn of Africa will be an added advantage.
• These consultants should have worked in either Benin, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, or Mozambique.

Duties and Responsibilities

• The Consultant will support Scofield Associates as the research partner of the program throughout the life of the program.
• This will include the assessments and evaluations for program impact on food security and nutrition in the six (Benin, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, & Uganda) countries identified for the project.

Scope of Work
The Food and Nutrition Security Consultant will work closely and report Scofield Associates Director. In detail, the Consultant, with the support of the Director, will be responsible for the following tasks:

• Statistical analysis and predictive modelling. Own process end-to-end: implement statistical methods and build, train, and deploy predictive models to solve problems in cash delivery utilizing code (e.g., Python, R). Current priorities:
• Targeting. Implement and improve existing machine learning algorithms predicting food security gaps and levels from call-detail records (CDR) and geospatial data. (Additional data areas will also be analysed during the period of the project).
• Risk prediction. Develop new risk prediction models that help in program cause correction and design to ensure that target recipients and communities are safe.
• Support data quality assurance. Work with the Senior Data Architect to design processes that ensure key metrics, models, and analysis are built on high-quality data during the program evaluation period.
• Communication. Collaborate with leaders throughout the organization to define data product requirements, educate them about solutions, and make recommendations.

Required Qualifications, Skills and Experience
Education:

• Bachelor's Degree in a STEM or other quantitative field
• Advanced Degree in a STEM or other quantitative field
• Experience analysing, geospatial (e.g., ArcGIS or Python geospatial stack), and/or social network data
• Experience developing an end-to-end machine learning pipeline with a scalable ML framework (TensorFlow, Torch, H2O, Spark MLib, sci-kit-learn)
• Familiarity with cloud-based solutions (AWS, GCP etc.) and setting up on-prem solutions for storing and processing large, terabyte-scale, datasets
• Familiarity with poverty measurement methodologies - e.g., geographic poverty, poverty proxies, common administrative data sources, household survey data
• Experience building dashboards and visualizations, preferably in Tableau
• Experience mentoring and developing teams of Data Scientists.

Experience:

• Minimum of 5 years of experience in development issues and projects in Benin, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, & Uganda.
• Minimum of 5 years of experience in evaluation, research, writing, communication, and developing communication products, especially project proposal.
• 5+ years experience working with data querying languages (e.g., SQL) and statistical modelling software (e.g., Python, R)
• 5+ years experience as a Data Scientist or related position applying statistical and/or machine learning (ML) techniques, with a deep understanding of the key parameters that affect their performance
• Deep understanding of ML algorithms - ability to apply the appropriate methods, as well as benchmark and diagnose predictions to rapidly improve performance
• Proficient in spark, dask, and/or other packages for distributed computing
• Ability to travel and deploy to international, on-premises locations for up to 1 month at a time
• Minimum 5 years of experience in working with international organizations and national governments in the horn of Africa.
• Strong evaluation, research, communications and writing skills.
• Experience in communication and developing communication products is essential.
• Experience in evaluation research and report and partnership with international organizations and national governments.

Language Requirements:

• Fluency in written and spoken English.
• Knowledge of French is an added advantage.

Competencies:
Corporate Competencies:

• Demonstrates integrity by modelling international values and ethical standards.
• Promotes the vision, mission, and strategic goals of Scofield Associates.
• Displays cultural, gender, religion, race, nationality and age sensitivity and adaptability.
• Treats all people fairly without favouritism.
• Technical Competencies:
• Analytic capacity and demonstrated ability to process, analyse and synthesize complex technical information.
• Ability to summarize complex information.
• Proven experience in the developing country context and working in different cultural settings.

Communication:

• Communicate effectively in writing to a varied and broad audience in a simple and concise manner.

Professionalism:

• Capable of working in a high-pressure environment with sharp and frequent deadlines, managing many tasks simultaneously.
• Excellent analytical and organizational skills.
• Frame a testable question from ambiguous requirements.
• Gather, clean, and manipulate the required data.
• Deliver answers that directly inform important decisions.

Teamwork:

• Projects a positive image and is ready to take on a wide range of tasks.
• Focuses on results for the client.
• Welcomes constructive feedback.

Application Closing Date
1st December, 2022.

Method of Application
Interested and qualified candidates should send their Cover Letter (2 pages Max - explaining how they would go about this role) and Resume that includes references and publication list, & Daily rate payment expectations in USD to: [email protected] using the Job Title as the subject of the email.