GOVERNMENT OF SIERRA LEONE

Request for Expressions of Interest (REOI) to recruit a Data Scientist

Date Issued : 5^th March, 2020

Sector : Research and Capacity Building

Grant Number : 5900155015951

Project ID No. : P-SL-KFO-012

The Government of Sierra Leone, through the Ministry of Finance, has received funding from the African Development Bank acting as administrators of grant funds under the Transition Support Facility (TSF). The said grant funding from the TSF Pillar III Window is to assist in the financing of the Enhancing Policy Development: Research and Capacity Building Project (ENPODEV) embedded in the Research and Delivery Division of the Ministry of Finance and intends to apply part of the agreed amount for this grant to payments under the contract for the recruitment of a Data Scientist.

The services include providing technical leadership to identify and clearly define the data sets that the Ministry should be collecting in the wider operations of Government, with specific data on the macro economy, human capital development, and private sector business data; devise methods of instrumenting the data sourcing and collection system in order to extract this information from the target sources, and to develop the processes that transform raw data into actionable business insights; contributing to developing suitable research products to inform policy and strategic decisions. The services also include performing data mining and exploratory statistical manipulations on tasks on very large datasets pertaining to the work of the Ministry; engaging in cleaning large structured and unstructured data and enable querying and manipulation of the data sets for various analytical purposes; Utilising appropriate analytical approaches to understand the trends in Government and Private sector data, applying advanced statistical and other data analysis techniques; building predictive models and machine-learning algorithms; combining models through ensemble modelling; develop suitable and simplified illustrations and visualisations of data that can easily be comprehended by non-technical stakeholder audiences as a means of providing actionable policy insights; collaborating with senior data scientists in other Government MDAs, including but not limited to Statistics Sierra Leone, the Directorate of Science Technology and Innovation, and the National Monitoring and Evaluation Department to remove obstacles and improve data related activities with a view to foster evidence-based decision making and Government programme delivery and also engaging in skills transfer especially with the Research and Delivery Division.

The Project Fiduciary Management Unit now invites individual consultants to indicate their interest in providing this service. Interested consultants must provide information (detailed curriculum vita including bio-data, copies of academic and professional qualification certificates and contact details), indicating that they are qualified to perform the services. Key qualification requirements include at least a BSc in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems or a related field or expertise. Database coursework or programming experience (Postgres, SQL, MongoDB); Data Cleaning with Python (Numpy, Pandas, Geopandas, pyspark); Python programming experience; Graphics design coursework or experience; JavaScript programming coursework or experience; JavaScript visualization experience; charts / dashboards (d3, superset, Kibana etc.); geospatial (leaflet, map box, qgis etc.)

Eligibility criteria, establishment of the short-list and the selection procedure shall be in accordance with the African Development Bank’s “Procurement Policy and Methodology for Bank Group Funded Operations” (BPM), dated October 2015 which is available on the Bank’s website at http://www.afdb.org.

Interested consultants may obtain further information at the address below during office hours from 9:00am- 4:30 pm Mondays- Fridays. Expressions of interest must be delivered to the address below by Thursday 19^th March, 2020 at 4:30pm and labelled Short-Term Consultancy Service for a Data Scientist.

The Team Lead

Project Fiduciary Management Unit -PFMU

Ministry of Finance

13A Howe Street-Africanus House

(Former World Bank Country Office) Freetown, Sierra Leone

Attn : The Secretariat, PFMU

Tel : +232 76-672-186

E-mail : pfmu2018@gmail.com