Senior Economist/ Data Scientist/ Statistician

Senior Economist/ Data Scientist/ Statistician

Job #:

req22186

Organization:

World Bank

Sector:

Poverty Reduction

Grade:

GG

Term Duration:

4 years 0 months

Recruitment Type:

International Recruitment

Location:

Washington, DC,United States

Required Language(s):

English

Preferred Language(s):

Arabic, French

Closing Date:

4/25/2023 (MM/DD/YYYY) at 11:59pm UTC

Description

Do you want to build a career that is truly worthwhile? Working at the World Bank provides a unique opportunity for you to help our clients solve their greatest development challenges. The World Bank consists of two entities - the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Development Association (IDA). It is a global development cooperative owned by 189 member countries. As the largest development bank in the world, the World Bank provides loans, guarantees, risk management products, and advisory services to middle-income and creditworthy low-income countries, and coordinates responses to regional and global challenges. Visit www.worldbank.org.

Poverty Global Practice

The Poverty and Equity Global Practice, part of the Equitable Growth, Finance, and Institutions vice-presidency, plays a key role in supporting the World Bank Group's goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. It generates knowledge and dialogue and supports operational solutions, focusing on poverty monitoring and statistical capacity building, markets and institutions, fiscal and social policy, and resilience to shocks and sustainability. The practice is organized into seven regionally-oriented units-EAP, ECA, LAC, MNA, SAR and two in AFR-each managed by a Practice Manager. The development and flow of global knowledge within the practice is facilitated through five cross-cutting thematic lines, each of which is led by a thematic Global Lead Economist. These are: (1) data for policy analysis; (2) markets and institutions for poverty reduction and shared prosperity; (3) fiscal and social policy for poverty reduction and shared prosperity; (4) welfare implications of fragility and conflict risks; and (5) welfare implications of climate change. Every member of the practice is affiliated with, participates in and contributes to the work of at least one of the thematic lines. In addition, the practice takes the lead in two corporate priority areas: (a) Data for Goals; and (b) Systematic Country Diagnostics.

Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Statistics Team

The main objective of the Statistics Team of the Poverty and Equity Practice at the MENA region is to help form the regional narrative on poverty and shared prosperity, by increasing the quality, availability, and use of indicators and micro-data in MENA. Some key functions of the Statistics team are:

• Compile relevant regional indicators for welfare monitoring, maintain a repository of existing data for each country, and keep a historical record of how consumption and poverty estimates have been generated across time.
• Maintain an internal website as a resource for basic regional data and analysis.
• Integrate the dialogue on data and statistics for the region and identify synergies across teams to minimize duplications.
• Ensure basic data collection standards are implemented across countries to ensure quality.
• Produce meaningful analytics using this data to inform evidence-based policy making.
• In collaboration with the Global team and other practices, identify innovations for improving welfare monitoring.
• Support global poverty monitoring efforts.

Duties and Accountabilities

The selected candidate will be based in Washington, DC. The MENA Poverty and Global Practice is seeking to recruit a micro-economist, statistician, or data scientist with knowledge and experience in social sector indicators and analysis, strong quantitative methods, and advanced programing skills, working experience statistical techniques. The selected candidate will also work on country statistics programs and support country poverty programs. Experiences and skills required to conduct such programs will be a plus. In particular, the candidate will have the following duties:

• Lead the MENA statistics team activities and supervise a team of consultants' part of the Statistics team.
• Conduct poverty, multidimensional poverty, shared-prosperity, and inequality data quality assessments and related analysis; contribute in reviewing and preparing technical notes and presentations relating to poverty, multidimensional poverty, shared-prosperity, inequality data; contribute in reviewing and preparing technical notes and presentations relating to poverty, shared prosperity, and inequality data; respond to data queries on poverty, shared-prosperity, and income inequality; and, participate in related workshops and training events.
• Lead the expansion and improvement of the systematization of harmonization protocols and analytical tools for poverty, shared prosperity, and equity, as well as multidimensional poverty and geospatial analytics in MENA.
• Identify opportunities to innovate, use AI, Machine learning and Big Data techniques in developing and implementing solutions for World Bank Poverty and Equity analytical works and projects, including through non-traditional data sources.
• Support poverty programs in selected MENA countries engaging in operational work with clients to design and deliver innovative analytical work, capacity building services, and technical assistance using recent development in technologies and methods.
• Build partnerships with other groups in the WB, including DEC teams and other GPs on poverty, shared prosperity and equity monitoring issues and applications using recent technologies and methods.
• Disseminate knowledge gained to country and regional teams in the practice, increasing the use of web-based visualizations on these indicators to tell clear stories.
• Participate in activities and exchange information with other World Bank teams working on similar issues across sectors and Global Solution Groups.
• Like all members of the Poverty global practice, the Senior Data Scientist will also be expected to contribute to the global knowledge base of the practice.

Selection Criteria

• A Master's degree (PhD preferred) in Economics, Statistics or Computer Science or a closely related field, with a minimum of eight years' relevant experience, or equivalent combination of education and experience.
• In-depth knowledge on poverty measurement and analysis using household survey data, including the use of sampling weights, the construction and analysis of consumption aggregates, the derivation of absolute poverty lines, the estimation of poverty/inequality and welfare measures, and related econometric techniques; Experience with country poverty programs and regional statistics programs is desirable.
• Good understanding of the relationships between poverty and outcomes in related indicators of well-being in the areas such as education and health. Experience with related survey-based social and gender indicators and issues is considered a plus.
• Experience building or working with interconnected IT architectures featuring i) interactive user interfaces, ii) various data sources, iii) automation of data generation and layout production processes, iv) workflow management, v) linkages with multiple software highly desirable.
• Excellent knowledge of Machine Learning, AI and Big Data techniques is strongly desired, such as experience and understanding of supervised and unsupervised machine learning, Time series, Natural language processing.
• Advanced programming skills in modern statistics, scripts and programming languages such as Stata/Mata, R & Python with a publication record of user-written routines.
• Commitment to teamwork, knowledge-sharing, and ability to influence across organizational boundaries; Experience in using Git or code sharing platforms.
• Demonstrated ability to develop and implement complex tasks, including a track record of building partnerships and collaborations across institutional boundaries.
• Demonstrated ability to multi-task and to effectively carry out multi-disciplinary analyses.
• Excellent written and verbal communications skills. In particular, the candidate will exhibit the ability to communicate ideas effectively and to interpret statistical data quickly and clearly, including with informative graphs and charts; Experience working with BI tools and in preparing data visualizations such as Tableau, R-Shiny, D3, etc. is desirable.
• Strong interpersonal skills and a demonstrated track record of meeting tight deadlines and of working in a multicultural team environment with multiple priorities.
• Ability to work with staff from all levels and to mentor, coach and motivate more junior staff.
• Reading, writing, and spoken fluency in Arabic and/or French is desirable.

World Bank Group Core Competencies

The World Bank Group offers comprehensive benefits, including a retirement plan; medical, life and disability insurance; and paid leave, including parental leave, as well as reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities.

We are proud to be an equal opportunity and inclusive employer with a dedicated and committed workforce, and do not discriminate based on gender, gender identity, religion, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or disability.

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