Code for Africa (CfA) has two immediate vacancies for full-time Data Analysts in Kenya and Senegal, with demonstrable experience in community management, stakeholder engagement, peer training/mentoring and data analysis.
We are recruiting for two positions, one based in Kenya (where the ideal candidate will be bilingual in English and Kiswahili) and one based in Senegal (where the ideal candidates will be bilingual in English and French).
CfA’s Knowledge initiative spearheads training management and partnerships, data analysis, digital journalism and storytelling initiatives for partner newsrooms, universities and local community events in Africa. 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 Knowledge team 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 Knowledge team of other data analysts, in-country community coordinators, digital designers, and editorial experts, with additional support from CfA’s software engineering and forensic research teams, in 21 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, media studies) or equivalent practical experience.
- 4 years of work experience in community management or data analysis or 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.
- Organised and able to create, manage and oversee multiple timelines and schedules.
- Ability to multitask, prioritise, and manage time efficiently.
- Excellent partnership engagement and stakeholder management skills
- Excellent leadership, team-building, and self-management skills.
- Proficient in English and Kiswahili / English and French (spoken and written)
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 discipline will be advantageous
- Expertise with statistical data analysis such as linear models, multivariate analysis, stochastic models, sampling methods.
- Applied experience with machine learning on large datasets.
- Demonstrated skills in selecting the right statistical tools given a data analysis problem.
- Familiarity with data analysis and data visualisation tools such as spreadsheets, R, Flourish, Tableau, PowerBI, MySQL/NoSQL, Python, Mapbox, Datawrapper
- Demonstrated leadership and self-direction.
- Willingness to teach others and learn new techniques.
- Relationships with universities, statistics organisations and media houses
Language and Location Requirements:
- Location: Kenya OR Senegal
- Languages: English and Kiswahili OR English and French
About this role
The successful candidate will join CfA’s Knowledge team which spearheads data liberation or digitisation and analysis for internal programmes at CfA and projects at external partners, including media and universities, assisting with data storytelling or infographics as part of our mission to improve citizen and civic watchdog access to actionable information.The successful candidate will help CfA build communities of change makers in Anglophone and Francophone Africa, and build sustainable relationships with regional partners, such as media houses, universities, research institutes, civic society organisations and government agencies. You will help partners share their insights and new skills via community meetups and peer-support networks, as well as through presentations at workshops/webinars. You will also support national and transnational digital projects, work on a range of social justice topics, 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.
The ideal candidates will have 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. 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 Knowledge 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 Knowledge project managers.
- Manage local WanaData & Hacks/Hackers chapters.
- Manage, train at and support communities and other Knowledge initiatives.
- Track and compile data collected about participants and the impacts of the training sessions.
- Conceptualise and develop 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.
- 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 30 September 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 84 staff in 20 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.