Background
Instructions to Applicants: Click on the "Apply now" button. Input your information in the appropriate Sections: personal information, language proficiency, education, resume and motivation. Upon completion of the first page, please hit "submit application" tab at the end of the page. Please ensure that CV or P11 and the Cover letter are combined in one file.
The following documents shall be required from the applicants:
Personal CV or P11, indicating all past positions held and their main underlying functions, their durations (month/year), the qualifications, as well as the contact details (email and telephone number) of the Candidate, and at least three (3) the most recent professional references of previous supervisors. References may also include peers.
A cover letter (maximum length: 1 page) indicating why the candidate considers him-/herself to be suitable for the position.
Managers may ask (ad hoc) for any other materials relevant to pre-assessing the relevance of their experience, such as reports, presentations, publications, campaigns or other materials.
Office/Unit/Project Description
UNCDF is the UN’s capital investment agency for the world’s least developed countries (LDCs). It creates new opportunities for poor people and their communities by increasing access to inclusive finance and investment capital. UNCDF focuses on Africa and the poorest countries of Asia and the Pacific, with a special commitment to countries emerging from conflict or crisis. It can provide seed capital both grants and loans as well as technical support that will improve poor peoples’ lives.
The UNCDF digital agenda for migration and remittances falls within the organization’s broader global strategy, set forth in 2019, of “Leaving No One Behind in the Digital Era.” This vision is to empower millions of people by 2024 to use services daily that leverage innovation and technology and contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals. Through a market development approach, UNCDF continuously seeks to address underlying market dysfunctions. The Programme contributes to, and benefits from, this overarching corporate mandate. The Programme is administered by UNCDF with funding from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, or SDC, and Sida, the Swedish International Development Agency.
UNCDF’s Migration and Remittances for Development Programme, or the Programme, aims at contributing to sustainable development by making remittances more accessible and affordable, while helping build resilience for migrants and their families. For both sending and receiving countries, the Programme seeks to increase the share of migrant remittances flowing through formal channels, thereby giving policymakers at both ends greater visibility into the true picture of inbound and outbound financial flows. For remittances service providers, the Programme seeks to build the capacity to understand the financial needs and preferences of migrants and their families, and to design and deliver responsive products accordingly. For migrants themselves, the Programme aims not only to lower the costs and increase the safety and convenience of sending money, but also to link remittances to a broader suite of financial services—including insurance, savings, pensions, investments, and credit—that can help them reach their goals. The Programme recognizes digitization as the key to achieving these objectives.
Institutional Arrangement
The direct supervisor of the Systems and Research Analyst will be the Systems and Research Lead, Migration and Remittance portfolio at UNCDF.
Duties and Responsibilities
Scope of Work
1) Contribute to knowledge management through sharing research findings on digital remittances
- Document research methodologies for internal learning and replicability and to contribute state-of-the art research and publications that help advance the remittance literature and best practices.
- Create data visualizations that communicate key findings and enable data exploration, combine text and graphs to build compelling narratives around insights and impact.
- Synthesize research insights into written blogs, articles, reports, and academic papers for external publication.
- Present research findings to the ecosystem at conferences and meetings.
2) Conduct and coordinate supply and demand-side research activities and contribute to the meaningful application of insights
- Conduct research projects that employ a variety of methods, including literature reviews, web-scraping, big data analytics, lean data surveys (i.e. IVR, CATI), and interviews.
- Apply rigorous academic methods (i.e. econometrics, statistics, machine learning) to research projects for the creation of new sector knowledge.
- Identify areas of synergy across research projects to encourage efficiency, collaboration, and the application of common systems and methods.
- Provide technical support in human-centric design techniques for gender-smart and migrant-centric product development and policy design.
3) Support the Migrant Money Data Collaborative, which aims to gather customer, product, institution, and market data on remittances for policy and innovation insights.
- Work with the data engineering consulting firm; advise on the design and implementation of the data management system and harmonization pipeline to ensure internal system requirements are met.
- Help to define system requirements for the data management system in terms of user types, tiers of access, data loading, extraction and visualization methods needed.
- Identify research queries and use cases, map use cases to the thematic learning agenda for remittances, and ensure that user interface and visualization method support the identified research queries and use cases.
- Identify and help crowd in potential partners to the Data Collaborative; present project to generate buy-in from a range of stakeholders, including RSPs, regulators, and ecosystem actors.
- Support internal trainings and the integration of the Data Collaborative tool and pipeline into existing processes for program reporting, results measurement, technical assistance; grant data loading and extraction privileges commensurate with user requirements.
Competencies
Core |
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Achieve Results: | LEVEL 2: Scale up solutions and simplifies processes, balances speed and accuracy in doing work |
Think Innovatively: | LEVEL 2: Offer new ideas/open to new approaches, demonstrate systemic/integrated thinking |
Learn Continuously: | LEVEL 2: Go outside comfort zone, learn from others and support their learning |
Adapt with Agility: | LEVEL 2: Adapt processes/approaches to new situations, involve others in change process |
Act with Determination: | LEVEL 2: Able to persevere and deal with multiple sources of pressure simultaneously |
Engage and Partner: | LEVEL 2: Is facilitator/integrator, bring people together, build/maintain coalitions/partnerships |
Enable Diversity and Inclusion: | LEVEL 2: Facilitate conversations to bridge differences, considers in decision making |
Cross-Functional & Technical competencies | ||
Thematic Area | Name | Definition |
Digital and Innovation | Digital Inclusion | Knowledge of how digital inclusion works, opportunities and challenges for governments and society |
Digital & Innovation | Data engineering | Ability in programming languages such as SQL, Python, and R, be adept at finding warehousing solutions, and using ETL (Extract, Transfer, Load) tools, and understanding basic machine learning and algorithms |
Digital & Innovation | Data governance | Knowledge of data science, skills to develop data management tools, organize and maintain databases and operate data visualization technologies |
Digital & Innovation | Data Strategy and management | Knowledge to draft or execute a data strategy or a data management framework |
Digital & Innovation | Innovation ecosystem curation | Ability to identify key players in an ecosystem, engage with them and mobilise them to build a community and over time a movement around a common mission that can bring about changes at the system level. Ability to give sense of purpose and build trust, develop programmes of activities and platforms to build and strengthen relationships |
Digital & Innovation | Portfolio design & management | Ability to identify leverage points in systems and design interventions that address them. The value of the interventions is determined not in isolation, but as part of the overall portfolio and their coherence. Ability to design processes that extract learning on an ongoing basis from existing portfolios, so that learning accrues over time and new options for action are continuously generated. Build a learning ecosystem around a complex development challenge: being able to mobilise a variety of stakeholders and help them learn and work together. Understand key principles of systems and complexity theory. |
Gender | Gender and Institutional Development | Gender and Institutional Development & Analysis |
Required Skills and Experience
Min. Education requirements |
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Min. years of relevant work experience |
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Required skills |
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Desired skills in addition to the competencies covered in the Competencies section |
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Required Language(s) |
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Professional Certificates |
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