Position in: Kenya
Do you want to help mentor and guide African journalists to use interactive data visualisations for storytelling?
Code for Africa (CfA) has an immediate vacancy for a full-time Data Analyst in Kenya to join our Data Academy team. Candidates must have demonstrable experience in data science and should be comfortable with peer training/mentoring.
Kiswahili speaking applicants based in Kenya will have an advantage.
CfA’s Data Academy, which spearheads our training partnerships and data analysis and storytelling initiatives. It also includes CfA communities such as the WanaData women data science/storytelling network and the africanDRONE civic drone community, as well as the sensors.AFRICA sensor journalism initiative, with a network of more than 50+ newsroom and university partners across Africa. The Data Academy is also custodian of other major CfA public infrastructure, such as the continent’s largest open data portal, open.AFRICA, and Africa’s largest census data portal, HURUMap.
The successful candidate will work with an agile transnational team of other data analysts, digital designers and data journalists in the Data Academy, with additional support from CfA’s software engineering and forensic research teams, in 20 countries across the continent.
Required minimum requirements include:
- Bachelor’s degree in a quantitative related discipline (e.g. information technology, statistics, operations research, bioinformatics, economics, computational biology, computer science, mathematics, physics, data science, natural language processing or machine learning) or in qualitative discipline (e.g. education, data journalism) or equivalent practical experience.
- 4 years of work experience in data analysis related fields.
- Be comfortable with training, skills coaching or related peer mentoring roles.
- Have the ability to work creatively and accurately under pressure with excellent attention to detail.
- Good interpersonal skills and communication with all levels of management.
- Organised and able to create multiple timelines and schedules.
- Ability to multitask, prioritise, and manage time efficiently.
- Excellent leadership, team-building, and self-management skills.
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
Preferred: candidates who are able to demonstrate the following will have an advantage:
- At least two years of experience as a trainer, technical skills coach or related position.
- Master’s degree in any quantitative research/data analysis related disciplines.
- Expertise with statistical data analysis such as linear models, multivariate analysis, stochastic models, sampling methods.
- Applied experience with machine learning on large datasets.
- Experience articulating and translating business questions and using statistical techniques to arrive at an answer using available data.
- Demonstrated skills in selecting the right statistical tools given a data analysis problem. Effective written and verbal communication skills.
- Experience with statistical software (e.g., R, Python, MATLAB, pandas, or equivalent) and database languages (e.g., SQL, NoSQL, etc.)
- Demonstrated leadership and self-direction. Willingness to teach others and learn new techniques.
- Relationships with universities and media houses are a plus.
Language and Location Requirements:
- Location: Kenya
- Languages: English and Kiswahili
- Preferred but not required: French and/or Arabic
About the Role
The successful candidate will join CfA’s Data Academy team. The Data Academy team is responsible for running data journalism and technical training for partner newsrooms, universities and local community events in Africa.
You will join the Data Academy’s team to help produce national and transnational digital projects, on a range of social justice topics, by assisting partners with data research and data collection/liberation, data analysis and wrangling. You will work with specialist CfA teams to help partners transform their data into visualisations or storytelling.
And, you will then help partners share their insights and new skills, via community meetups and peer-support networks, as well as through presentations at workshops/webinars. Other aspects of your training duties will include customising CfA courseware to include local examples and presenting curricula at local events/universities.
The candidate should have a strong strategic analysis and critical thinking skills, as our projects are varied and fast-paced, so you need to quickly understand and learn new things. You will need to possess a keen attention to detail and a good eye for both quality and aesthetics. You should be comfortable handling multiple tasks with multiple ongoing deadlines and should have previous experience working on the digital collaboration tools that CfA uses, such as Slack, Google Drive, and Trello.
Responsibilities: Your daily responsibilities will include:
- Schedule, manage and run training sessions with newsroom partners under the supervision of the Academy project managers.
- Actively support, mentor and motivate journalists to help them with the timely completion of their training aims and story production.
- Create weekly and monthly reports for Academy project managers
- Train at and support WanaData, Hacks/Hackers and other Academy events.
- Track and compile data collected about participants and the impacts of the training sessions.
- Create training strategies, and initiative, including conceptualising and developing training materials.
- Support the CfA’s data research, wrangling and visualisation processes and tasks to improve CfA’s products, content and brands with other wranglers and designers.
- Work with journalists and developers from across the continent to design and build engaging static and interactive visualisations and tools.
- Research and mine datasets to create impactful analyses and visualisations on CfA’s key topics.
- Produce maps, satellite images, charts, infographics, data visualisations and other dataviz components for stories, microsites and publications.
- Work proactively and think critically to improve data and design components of tools and stories created by the team.
- Train and advise CfA’s key stakeholders and partners on the use of data and tech to amplify their impact.
What We Offer:
- A competitive salary, subject to experience, with opportunities for performance-based growth, both in terms of career path and public stature.
- A dynamic workplace, with a transnational team, occasional international travel, and generous vacation benefits.
- Ongoing opportunities to learn new cutting-edge skills and techniques/technologies to future-proof yourself in a rapidly evolving industry.
- A chance to shine on a global stage, writing for international audiences and interacting with colleagues around the world.
How to apply:
Please complete this form by 28 February 2021
About Us:
Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest network of indigenous African civic technology and investigative data journalism laboratories, with over 70 staff in 19 countries, who build digital democracy solutions that are intended to give citizens unfettered access to actionable information that empowers them to make informed decisions and that strengthen civic engagement for improved public governance and accountability.
This includes building infrastructure such as the continent’s largest open data portal, open.AFRICA, and largest open source civic software portal, commons.AFRICA, as well as the largest repository of investigative document-based evidence, source.AFRICA, as well as incubating initiatives as diverse as the africanDRONE network that gives citizens their own ‘eyes in the sky’, the PesaCheck fact-checking initiative in 12 African countries, and the sensors.AFRICA remote-sensing citizen science initiative to combat air/water pollution.
CfA also incubates the African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR), as an association of the continent’s best investigative newsrooms, ranging from large traditional mainstream media to smaller specialist units. ANCIR member newsrooms investigate crooked politicians, organised crime and big business. The iLAB is ANCIR’s in-house digital forensic unit, with teams in east, south and west Africa. ANCIR uses its resources to strengthen newsrooms’ own internal capacity, by providing access to the world’s best whistleblower encryption and investigative semantic analysis technologies, as well as skills development, and seed grants for cross-border collaboration.
At CfA, we don’t just accept differences – we celebrate it, we support it, and we thrive on it for the benefit of our employees, our products and our community. CfA is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.
To all recruitment agencies: CfA does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our employment application line, CfA employees or any other CfA contact. CfA is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.