Location: Preferably in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Remote possible, but travel to Dar required.

Projected start date: ASAP

Reports to: Country Manager, Tanzania

Duration: April - July 2019

Background

HOT is carrying out a World Bank funded program called “Ramani Huria” – Swahili for “Open Mapping”. Ramani Huria works with Tanzanian university students and community members to create freely available datasets for urban resilience. It is the largest community mapping initiative in Africa, and strives to be an example for others.

Within the scope of the Tanzanian Urban Resilience Program (TURP), Ramani Huria has been critical in understanding climate risk and uncertainty in the local context, and enhancing the linkages and coordination between risk management actors. As part of the program there are specific communications, advocacy and reporting needs, including a monthly blog post, information dissemination through local and international media, presentations to technical specialists, and quarterly reports.

Profile

The Data Communications and Visualization Specialist will be responsible for producing data analysis, visualizations, and reporting that communicates deep insights and analysis into the various (geospatial) datasets collected as part of Ramani Huria. The specific focus for the selected candidate will be to lead data and design work for the final two reports and policy brief to be submitted to the World Bank. This entails:

• Collate, analyze and effectively present a variety of Open Data that has been created by the Ramani Huria and OpenStreetMap teams.
• Assist and guide the team in building presentations of datasets for stakeholders who can use the data for impact.
• Design and produce high quality reporting on the project to the World Bank - report will be submitted as a printed output, but may link to interactive resources.
• Communicate project progress and successes with stakeholders including the public, the Government of Tanzania, development stakeholders.
• Present information and analysis to citizens on information gathered through the community mapping exercise in all appropriate forums.

Practicalities

This position is based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, with the primary place of work being at HOT Tanzania’s workplace. Partial remote work possible. The position is currently funded until the end of July 2019. Additional information about Ramani Huria can be found: http://ramanihuria.org/.

Eligibility Criteria

• Care deeply about the mission: passionate about humanitarian / development work demonstrated through prior professional or volunteer experiences
• Demonstrated knowledge of data science/visualization
• Ability to communicate information clearly and efficiently using data visualization techniques
• Outstanding written and spoken English
• At least 2 years’ professional experience with communications and design
• Ability to tell stories with data via simple visuals and story maps
• Clear, concise, and compelling writing skills; ability to use photo editing and graphic design tools
• Excellent data management, organized, and attentive to detail

Additional desirable skill sets:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree (preferred) in Data Science, Statistics, GIS, Geography, Journalism, Marketing, Graphic Design, Communications or related field
• Familiarity with specific data science packages such as Python/Jupyter/Pandas, R, advanced QGIS (at least to the level of SQL queries and/or multiline expressions), or similar
• Experience designing interactive dashboards in platforms like PowerBI, etc
• Previous experience in journalism or mass media outreach e.g. writing press releases
• Swahili desirable but not necessary
• Skilled in technical writing
• Experience in disaster response, open data or open source strongly desired
• Experience in creating reports (preferably with open source tools such as Scribus or LaTex)