Code for Kenya has an immediate vacancy for a Data Wrangler to work on its data liberation programme.
The successful candidate will be based out of Code for Africa’s tech lab in Nairobi, Kenya, and will champion our digital journalism and open government tools through communities such as Hacks/Hackers Africa and Codebridge, while also assisting on our Ujuzi Skills Programme.
WHO WE ARE
Code for Africa is the continent’s largest independent open data and civic technology initiative. Our federation of partners in 20+ countries seek to build digital democracies that give citizens timely and unfettered access to actionable information that empowers them to make informed decisions and strengthens civic engagement.
A major focus of this work is to strengthen watchdog journalism by providing digital tools, data, and editorial support through grant-making programmes such as innovateAFRICA and impactAFRICA.
There is a more detailed overview of our programmes at the end of this advert.
MORE ABOUT THE JOB
Code for Kenya is looking for a dynamic and motivated data wrangler/scraper to work with us in Nairobi. The primary focus will be to support the work of the Project Lead and team in applying automated techniques to gather data from disparate databases and cleaning the data.
The successful candidate will gain exposure to digital tools and ecosystems and experience in all aspects of digital technology.
The prospective candidate’s role would include:
- Research and curate document & data sources
- Document scraping and upload to CfKenya’s and CfAfrica’s web portals
- Accessing and extracting data through various means (web services, web crawlers, direct access to source database, physically etc).
- Accessing and cleaning a variety of data source formats (e.g. PowerPoint, PDF, Word, Text, Access, SharePoint, Oracle, MySQL, etc.).
- Fixing OCR (Optical Character Recognition) issues on processed documents
- Creating data visualisations
- Working together with the Community & Knowledge lead to support the Hacks/Hackers community & Ujuzi skills programmes.
This is an opportunity to learn and get hands on experience on content management systems, design, development and optimization. The successful candidate will also gain experience with organising community events as well as running data skills programmes.
The successful candidate must
- Have a good command of the English language
- Be a self-starter
- Be creative and innovative
- Be a quick learner
- Be I.T. savvy
You should
- Have basic to intermediate website management experience
- Undergraduate degree from a reputable institution
- Have your own laptop
We Offer
- Opportunity to become part of the open data & open government revolution
- Amazing work space out of a citizen lab based in Nairobi Garage
- No dress code, plus a chance to work with innovative minds and fun personalities
The position is contract based, for an initial 12 months, renewable for further one year periods, with remuneration subject to experience / seniority. The successful candidate will be expected to start as soon as possible, but no later than 15 January 2017, on an initial three month probationary contract.
HOW TO APPLY:
Applicants should send compelling cases (be as creative as you’d like), with clear showcase of skills and past experience, to join@codeforkenya.org. Please include on the subject line: Data Wrangler: Code For Kenya.
Deadline: January 15th, 2017
ABOUT US:
Code for Africa (CfAfrica) is the continent’s largest independent open data and civic technology initiative. We seek to build digital democracies that give citizens timely and unfettered access to actionable information that empowers them to not only make informed decisions,but also strengthens civic engagement for improved public governance and accountability.
CfAfrica operates as a federation of autonomous country-based digital innovation organisations that support ‘citizen labs’ in nine countries and major projects in a further 15 countries. There are CfAfrica affiliate labs in Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. CfAfrica runs Africa’s OpenGov Fellowships and also embeds Innovation Fellows into newsrooms and social justice organisations to help liberate data of public interest, or to build tools that help empower citizens.
In addition to fellowships and citizen labs, CfAfrica runs the $1 million per year #innovateAFRICA fund plus the $500,000/year #impactAFRICA fund and the $500,000/year Sandbox Fund which all award seed grants to civic pioneers for experiments with everything from camera drones and environmental sensors, to encryption for whistleblowers and data-driven semantic analysis tools for investigative watchdogs.
CfAfrica also curates continental resources such as the africanSPENDING portal of budget transparency resources, the openAFRICA data portal, the sourceAFRICA document repository, and the connectedAFRICA transparency toolkit for tracking the often hidden social networks and economic interests in politics. CfAfrica is furthermore custodian of the continental 30,000 strong Hacks/Hackers community, and incubates the continent’s largest investigative journalism initiative, the African Network of Centers for Investigating Reporting (which spearheaded the #PanamaPapers investigations on the continent).