UNDP Jobs - 65780- Provision of Individual consultant of a Technical

Provision of Individual consultant of a Technical Expert to Assess a Web Portal and its Database (2 Experts).

Location :

Beirut, LEBANON

Type of Contract :

Individual Contract

Starting Date :

Application Deadline :

06-May-16 (Midnight New York, USA)

Post Level :

International Consultant

Duration of Initial Contract :

15 days

Languages Required :

Arabic English

Expected Duration of Assignment :

15 days

UNDP is committed to achieving workforce diversity in terms of gender, nationality and culture. Individuals from minority groups, indigenous groups and persons with disabilities are equally encouraged to apply. All applications will be treated with the strictest confidence. UNDP does not tolerate sexual exploitation and abuse, any kind of harassment, including sexual harassment, and discrimination. All selected candidates will, therefore, undergo rigorous reference and background checks.

Background

The Arab Development Portal (ADP) is an initiative of the Coordination Group of Arab, National and Regional Development Institutions (CG) to create a knowledge platform, which promotes timely and high quality knowledge sharing and cooperation, to generate opportunities for development and stimulate informed discussion on development issues among stakeholders, practitioners and citizens. By having access to and effectively using knowledge resources, individuals, firms and communities can improve their individual and collective well-being, thereby contributing to overall economic development. However, data and resources on development issues in the Arab World can be out of date, of irregular reliability, and are often fragmented across multiple international, regional and local sources. In addition, there are significant opportunities for enhancing the transfer of global and regional knowledge to and within the Arab World on development issues, including best practices. To address these gaps, the Heads of Institutions of the Coordination Group launched the Arab Development Portal (ADP) initiative to improve the scope, depth, reliability, availability and use of high quality development information to support development progress in the Arab World. The primary target audiences for the ADP include decision-makers in the public sector, private sector, academia, media and civil society with an active interest in development efforts in the Arab World. The ADP aims to:

Provide access to credible data produced by international and regional organizations as well as national statistical offices;
Serve as a research and knowledge repository for knowledge producers and users;
Act as an interactive platform for communities and interest groups.

Duties and Responsibilities

UNDP has recently developed a new portal that includes a multi-source statistical database and website. The website offers users many functionalities through the following modules: statistical database and data visualization and data export, publication, news and events, blogs, country profiles, and a search engine. Currently, the UNDP is planning to widen the scope of its ADP by adding more topics and modules, enhancing the data visualization tools, embedding a dashboard functionality, creating machine-to-machine data exchange module, and introducing a more sophisticated search engine. On the content management system, the UNDP also aims to revise the system such that it becomes much more efficient with more organized workflow. Ultimately, this will lead to increasing the database volume. At the same time, the ADP is expecting high number of users once launched in April 2016 and over the next few years.

The Technical Expert will be in charge of reviewing the current functionalities and the technology used in the construction of the current website and propose specific improvements with regard to choice of technology and best practices in implementing the ADP new scope of work as described in the Annex 1. At all levels, the expert needs to discuss with UNDP team the details of reviewing the website and the database, and their expectation on deliverables. The UNDP will provide to the expert all technical materials related to the website, especially website documentation, in the beginning of his/her mission.

For additional information, please refer to ANNEX I – Terms of Reference

Competencies

Corporate Competencies:

Analyzes the requirements and synthesizes proposals;
Researches best practices and poses new, more effective ways of doing things.

Functional Competencies:

Understands the main processes and methods of work regarding to the position;
Strong writing and reporting skills.

Required Skills and Experience

I. Academic Qualifications:

Graduate Degree (Masters or equivalent) in Computer Science or Computer Engineering.

II. Years of experience:

A minimum of 10 years of progressive experience in designing, developing, and tuning applications on different web development platforms, among which is Drupal;
Extensive experience in database creation and maintenance using different web platforms;
Experience in conceiving and developing data visualization tools for statistical databases.

III. Language Requirements:

Strong writing and reporting skills in English;
Arabic language is secondary.

Kindly refer to the Individual Consultant Procurement Notice and all related Annexes by visiting the below link:

http://www.lb.undp.org/content/lebanon/en/home/operations/procurement/

Please make sure to submit all the requested documents/information; otherwise, your application will be considered incomplete