Consultancy - Data Science Strategist, Office of Innovation, Remote, 11.5 months

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UNICEF works in some of the world’s toughest places, to reach the world’s most disadvantaged children. To save their lives. To defend their rights. To help them fulfill their potential.

Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone.

And we never give up.

For every child, innovate...

About Giga

Launched in 2019 as a joint-initiative between UNICEF and ITU, Giga has set the ambitious goal to connect every school in the world to the internet. Half of the world’s population has no regular access to the Internet. Millions of children leave school without any digital skills, making it much more difficult for them to thrive and contribute to local and global economies. This has created a digital divide between those who are connected and those who are not, a divide that has become even wider during the Covid-19 pandemic. UNICEF and ITU have therefore joined forces to create Giga, an initiative to connect every school in the world to the Internet and address this new form of inequality.

Giga focuses on connecting schools so that children and young people have access to information, opportunity, and choice. It also uses schools as anchor points for their surrounding communities: if you connect the school, you can also connect local businesses and services. This creates opportunities for service providers to generate revenue from paying users, making connectivity more sustainable. A recent report by the Economist Intelligence Unit found that a 10% increase in school connectivity can increase effective years of schooling by 0.6% and increase GDP per capita by 1.1%.

You cannot fix a problem unless you can see it, so the first step is to map schools and their connectivity levels. Giga uses machine learning to scan satellite images and identify schools. These are then marked by coloured dots on an open-source map: green where there is good connectivity (over 5mb/s); amber where it is limited; and red where there is no connectivity at all. The project has already mapped over 920,000 schools in 40 countries, including several which were previously unknown to governments.

Connecting every school in the world could cost US$428 billion or more. Much of the funding already exists but it is not always well aligned. Giga therefore works with governments to unlock public funds for use in delivering connectivity and to attract private investors by reducing the risks in harder-to-reach areas. We are also proposing a $5 billion Bond to finance last-mile connectivity and catalyse large-scale investment. The bond would be backed by donor governments and private foundations, much like the one issued by Gavi / IFFiM to deliver vaccines around the world.

Once school connectivity has been mapped and financing secured, Giga works with a range of partners to bring the Internet to schools. We support governments in designing competitive procurement processes. We are also developing real-time payment mechanisms, meaning that if a dot on the connectivity map is only green for three hours a day, the provider only gets paid for three hours of access. Giga is already connecting schools in 19 countries and is prototyping several test solutions, including in refugee camps and remote, mountainous regions.

Just as building railroads allowed previously isolated towns to flourish, providing good quality Internet access will allow communities to participate in the digital economy for the first time. But Giga’s work in laying the tracks for connectivity is only one part of a wider effort to bridge the digital divide. UNICEF’s Reimagine Education initiative brings all of this work together and has set the goal of connecting every child and young person – some 3.5 billion – to world-class digital learning solutions by 2030. In addition to Giga, it includes components focusing on the affordability of data and content, access to devices, teacher certification and the engagement of young people. Along with ITU’s digital skills programme and other initiatives, Reimagine Education aims to ensure that, once connected, young people are empowered with the tools they need to shape their own futures.

Our partners are a huge part of our work, supporting us with both financial resources and in-kind support. We currently have a portfolio of a small group of major financial partners, and a larger group of others who provide technical assistance on important projects, including data sharing, cost model development, and more.

You can read more about Giga’s work at https://gigaconnect.org/ and by following us on twitter @Gigaconnect"

About Our Team

We are a fast-paced, multi-disciplinary team of software engineers, finance specialists, data scientists, policy experts, and much more. Our team is a distributed workforce and plans to remain distributed into the foreseeable future.

We are growing fast. Our team has grown by over 400% in the last 6 months as we rapidly scale to meet our stated mission. To date, Giga has brought on more than a dozen partners and raised over $22M in funding. But many of our partners contribute more than just funding. To us, partners are collaborators, working shoulder to shoulder with our team to develop software, analyze data, conduct groundbreaking research, and much more!

How can you make a difference?

We seek a strong self-motivated Data Science strategist who can maintain the quality of its work even under tight time constraints and who can work with a diverse interdisciplinary team to help us build quality data pipelines & tools and run analysis to generate critical insights for the Giga project and for UNICEF Country Offices.

Your main responsibilities will be…

• Build data workflows to ingest, process and visualize school and connectivity data on Project Connect.
• Develop data quality assessment algorithms and analytics reporting systems shareable across the Giga team, UNICEF Country Offices and other key partners.
• Perform analysis and build models to understand the impact of school connectivity on students and on the socio-economic status of surrounding communities.
• Build and scale necessary ML models, collaborate with open-source and research communities to map schools and their attributes to the Giga database.
• Productize data and algorithms for tech and non-tech users within the Giga team and open-source data community.
• Act as an expert on the latest technology trends, products and tools in the space of data, analytics, machine learning and/or AI.
• Support product team as data product expert while designing, building, and testing data and tech products.
• Create data insight stories, research studies and open-source resources to communicate the work with different stakeholders and community members.

To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have…

• An advanced university degree (Master’s or higher) in computer science, data science or other related fields. *A first University Degree in a relevant field combined with 2 additional years of professional experience may be accepted in lieu of an Advanced University Degree.
• A minimum of 8 years of relevant professional experience in data science and strategy.
• In-depth understanding of data processes, structures, analytics and visualization techniques.
• Experience in working with building and scaling AI/ML algorithms.
• Strong understanding of data products and tools used by analysts, scientists and data professionals.
• Experience in creating data product strategy and roadmaps while interacting cross-functionally across teams.
• Experience with scripting data science languages like python or R.
• Experience in working with databases/datalakes, orchestration tools like airflow, DBT etc, analytics and visualization tools like PowerBI, Metabase, Kepler.gl etc. and collaboration tools such as GitHub, Trello, Slack, Jira and Miro.
• Curiosity and willingness to learn about emerging Open-source technologies and communities are an asset.
• Developing country work experience and/or familiarity with emergencies is considered an asset.
• Fluency in English is required. Knowledge of another official UN language (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian or Spanish) or a local language is an asset.

For every Child, you demonstrate…

UNICEF's values of Care, Respect, Integrity, Trust, and Accountability (CRITA).

The competencies required for this post are….

• Relating and Networking - Lv 2
• Apply Technical Expertise - Lv 2
• Creating and Innovating - Lv 2

To view our competency framework, please visit here.

Payment details and further considerations

• Monthly payment, based on monthly tasks and progress reports, approved upon monthly review with supervisor.
• Consultant is responsible for his/her own health and travel insurance
• Consultant is eligible for standard DSA for all work-related travel

UNICEF is committed to diversity and inclusion within its workforce, and encourages all candidates, irrespective of gender, nationality, religious and ethnic backgrounds, including persons living with disabilities, to apply to become a part of the organization.

UNICEF has a zero-tolerance policy on conduct that is incompatible with the aims and objectives of the United Nations and UNICEF, including sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual harassment, abuse of authority and discrimination. UNICEF also adheres to strict child safeguarding principles. All selected candidates will be expected to adhere to these standards and principles and will therefore undergo rigorous reference and background checks. Background checks will include the verification of academic credential(s) and employment history. Selected candidates may be required to provide additional information to conduct a background check.

Remarks:

Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted and advance to the next stage of the selection process.

Individuals engaged under a consultancy or individual contract will not be considered “staff members” under the Staff Regulations and Rules of the United Nations and UNICEF’s policies and procedures, and will not be entitled to benefits provided therein (such as leave entitlements and medical insurance coverage). Their conditions of service will be governed by their contract and the General Conditions of Contracts for the Services of Consultants and Individual Contractors. Consultants and individual contractors are responsible for determining their tax liabilities and for the payment of any taxes and/or duties, in accordance with local or other applicable laws.