International Statistician Specialist

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FAO - Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

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Application deadline 2 years ago: Wednesday 16 Feb 2022 at 22:59 UTC

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Organizational Setting

The Food And Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Subregional Office for the Pacific (SAP) covers Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Republic of Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. FAO SAP is responsible for developing, promoting, overseeing and implementing agreed strategies for addressing subregional agriculture, food, nutrition and rural development priorities. FAO SAP develops and maintains relations with subregion-wide institutions including the Council of Regional Organizations in the Pacific (CROP). The Subregional Office is a subsidiary of FAO’s Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (RAP) in Bangkok.

Purpose of this Call

FAO SAP is recruiting a long-term Senior International Statistician Consultant/PSA who will provide technical leadership over its Statistics Portfolio that informs FAO, governments and other development partners’ programming and decision making with the relevant evidence base.

Reporting Lines

The Senior International Statistician Specialist will work under the overall supervision of the FAO Subregional Coordinator, and direct supervision of the Nutrition and Food Systems Officer for the Subregional Office for the Pacific Islands.

Technical Focus

  • Sustainable Development Goals indicators;
  • Food balance sheets and Supply Utilization Accounts (agricultural production, trade, stocks, and other utilization statistics)
  • Postharvest losses, food losses and food waste statistics;
  • Food security and nutrition statistics;
  • Crops, livestock, fisheries, aquaculture and forestry statistics;
  • Prices, costs of production, investment and public expenditure statistics;
  • National Accounts Statistics and System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) on crop, livestock, fishing and forestry sub-sector including capital formation;
  • Agro-environmental statistics including Fertilizers, Pesticides and Land Use;
  • Climate change relevant statistics and indicators, including green house gas emissions;
  • Poverty and rural poverty statistics, rural livelihoods statistics;
  • Agricultural surveys and censuses;
  • Agricultural and rural labour and decent work statistics, social protection statistics;
  • Territorial statistics, including rural and rural livelihoods statistics;
  • Geo-spatial statistical applications; Land cover/land use statistics;
  • Statistics on resilience, damage and losses from hazardous events;
  • Corporate statistical planning and corporate statistical policies;
  • Quality assurance of statistical processes;
  • International Definitions, Classifications and statistical standards;
  • Monitoring and Evaluation of corporate results frameworks.

Tasks and responsibilities

Ability to undertake the following activities:

  • strategic planning in agricultural and rural statistics
  • provision of technical advice, assistance and statistical capacity development services, including needs assessments
  • design, preparation and management of statistical projects
  • statistical policy advocacy, communication and implementation
  • production of a variety of technical reports and provides input in flagship publications, technical documents, departmental publications and/or web pages
  • archiving, communication and dissemination of statistical products
  • organization, conduct and follow-up of meetings, consultations and conferences the development/production of required materials and the provision of information and assistance to partners
  • perform other related duties as required.

Ability to lead/coordinate the following activities, and undertake at least three:

  • methodological development (for data processing, analysis, imputation of missing data, validation and quality control)
  • sampling design
  • questionnaire design
  • data collection, processing, analysis, validation and dissemination at national and sub-national level
  • analysis of data with item-response-theory
  • analysis and validation of trade flow data (quantity & value), by reporter and partner
  • processing of micro-data and computation of indicators from household surveys and farm surveys
  • technologies for data collection (CAPI, Remote Sensing, Crowdsourcing, Web scrapping)
  • methodological development (for data processing, analysis, imputation of missing data, validation and quality control)
  • use of administrative data in agricultural and rural statistics

CANDIDATES WILL BE ASSESSED AGAINST THE FOLLOWING

Minimum Requirements

  • University degree in statistics, mathematics, economics, agricultural economics, or a related field
  • At least five years of relevant experience in the compilation and analysis of food and agricultural statistics in national or international organizations
  • Working knowledge of English, French or Spanish and limited knowledge of one of the other two or Arabic, Chinese, Russian. For PSA.SBS the working knowledge of English will be sufficient.

FAO Core Competencies

  • Results Focus
  • Teamwork
  • Communication
  • Building Effective Relationships
  • Knowledge Sharing and Continuous Improvement

Technical/Functional Skills

  • Extent of knowledge and relevance of experience in conducting methodological research in data disaggregation in general and for SDG indicators in particular
  • Strong command of statistical methods including: data presentation, analysis and descriptive statistics; main continuous and discrete random variables (binomial, normal, standard normal, log-normal) and their properties; probability distributions; conditional probability, probabilities of intersections of events, Bayes' theorem; correlation and rank correlation; sampling and sample size: simple, stratified, and multistage random sampling; Inference, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing and significance; linear regression (single and multiple) comparison of population means and variances, ANOVA; Chi-square and goodness of fit tests; nonlinear models: maximum likelihood estimation; elements of survey and questionnaire design
  • Extent of knowledge and relevance of experience in quantitative analyses
  • Extent of knowledge and relevance of experience in household and/or farm survey methodology.
  • Excellent of knowledge and relevance of experience in using statistical software
  • Extent and relevance of experience in the formulation of technical assistance projects, provision of technical support and preparation/implementation of training programmes in the field of statistics in general and SDG indicators in particular.
  • Ability to work independently, with minimum supervision
  • Ability to engage with potential donors and mobilize resources to support statistical capacity development initiatives.
Added 2 years ago - Updated 2 years ago - Source: fao.org