Social Vulnerability Calculation Tool Development

Contract

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The idea of Social Vulnerability is well established in humanitarian sciences and helps to identify exposed population groups to natural hazards or external shocks. It is defined as: “The differential capacity of groups and individuals to deal with hazards and shocks, based on their positions within physical and social worlds.” There are numerous operational definitions of social vulnerability to natural hazards as well such as “It is also the inability to take effective measures to insure against losses”. We will follow the established methodologies such as proposed in the UNDP working article: “Social vulnerability assessment tools for climate change and DRR programming1”.

We will be working in a SCRUM based process and try to iteratively explore the solutions for the problem. The goal is to achieve milestones every 3 weeks and to finish the work after 3 months. Our partners will be leading the decision-making process and set goals and targets to the team of volunteers to achieve the required outputs. The Lab provides in-house expertise, resources, and research support to various UNDP projects to mainstream digital transformation to development problems and to contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.

SDG AI Lab is working on the concept of Social Vulnerability and will launch a product based on the idea. We already developed computational models to calculate Social Vulnerability based on a selected Household Survey dataset and now need assistance in deploying the model and data into an interactive online tool. We need assistance in the further refinement of the model and its validation, but mostly in the implementation of the idea as an online tool. The tool should feature an embedded map, with all the necessary features provided to be usable in an interactive way (for instance Leaflet). It will have functions to execute python scripts, which are functioning as the backend. These scripts do calculate Social Vulnerability and help in the preprocessing of the data ingested. We need to develop dashboard and visualizations within the tool, which could be compared to the ones provided by ‘PowerBI’ or similar.

Bachelor’s (or higher) in Computer Science, Frontend development might be required), hence skills in JavaScript, Python, HTML (depending on the framework chosen). Further, since the model is a geophysical simulation, Geoengineering, Geomatics, Geography, Statistics, or related field with strong interest in Data Science are beneficial; Understanding and knowledge of analytical techniques such as predictive analytics, event detection / prediction, data visualization, and experience machine learning modeling is a plus.