Project Manager - CBT Central Analytics Team (World Food Programme)

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE OF THE ASSIGNMENT:

WFP country offices deliver assistance to beneficiaries through a variety of digital platforms and service providers. In 2017, WFP worked in partnership with more than 70 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. WFP’s Technology Division in HQ is establishing a digital core of technical infrastructure, including a “Data Lake” where it is intended that data from WFP’s corporate systems (WINGS, COMET and SCOPE) will be stored and made accessible for analysis along with other operational data from FSPs, MMOs, CFM and retailers among others. The Data Lake provides an opportunity to develop centralised data analytics by hosting the relevant data in one accessible location.

To achieve the objectives outlined above, WFP is recruiting a project manager to coordinate and oversee the work of a CBT Central Analytics Team based in its Rome Headquarters, in the CBT Unit in the Office of the Chief of Staff. The team will be composed of Data Engineers, Data Analysts and Data Scientists that will be working closely with WFP’s business units in HQ and in the field to provide digital analytics support to WFP’s CBT operations globally.

PROJECT MANAGER

ACCOUNTABILITIES/RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Manage and coordinate the activities of the CBT Central Analytics Team.
• Interface with WFP business units and country offices to design analytical solutions and ensure quality support and outputs are provided by the CBT Central Analytics Team.
• Support overall systems coherence and functionality for WFP’s relevant CBT corporate and non-corporate systems and processes.
• Engage with WFP’s Technology Division to develop strategies for systematically receiving, transforming and processing raw operational data from external service providers and partners, and data from WFP corporate systems including WINGS, COMET, SCOPE.
• Develop systems to ensure beneficiary data is stored in secure centralized repositories in collaboration with WFP Technology Division.
• Ensure standard operating procedures are in place to ensure integrity of data and processes.
• Work with medium/large Country Offices to train/recruit local data analysts to perform selected analysis tasks in-country.
• Ensure audit trail and governance for analytical codes, rules and outputs.
• Work closely with business units to identify and report issues and use data to propose solutions for follow-up and effective decision making.
• Stay on top of analytical techniques such as machine learning, deep learning and text analytics.
• Continuously monitor and test systems to ensure optimized performance.

QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE REQUIRED:

Education: Advanced degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Management Information Systems or Economics.​​​​​​​

Skills & Knowledge: 

• Strong project management and leadership skills and experience.
• Ability to coordinate complex activities and work streams and deliver results.
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills, awareness and intelligence.
• Experience working with large data sets and summarizing data for business.
• Familiarity with data warehousing and business intelligence concepts.
• Ability to capture requirements and translate into insights.
• Experience or familiarity with SQL databases, Hadoop, big data services offered by AWS or other cloud providers, an ETL/ELT tool like Alteryx or Talend.
• Oversee trend analysis to promote assurances and programme effectiveness.
• Oversee data cleaning, organization and analysis and set up of regular reporting dashboards.
• Detect operational anomalies to trigger further review or fraud investigations.
• Mature judgement. Experience in working in a multicultural environment.

Languages: English (fluent). Any other UN languages, a plus.​​​​​​​