The Centre for Humanitarian Data is focused on increasing the use and impact of ...
The Centre for Humanitarian Data is focused on increasing the use and impact of data in humanitarian response. It is managed by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and is based in The Hague, the Netherlands. The Centre’s vision is to create a future where everyone involved in a humanitarian emergency has access to the data they need, when and how they need it, to make responsible and informed decisions.
The Centre focuses on four areas: data services, data responsibility, data literacy, and predictive analytics. The data services workstream focuses on the management of the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) platform, the development and use of the Humanitarian Exchange Language (HXL) data standard, and support to the International Aid Transparency Initiative.
As part of the data services workstream, the Centre manages the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) which is an open platform for sharing data across crises and organisations. Launched in July 2014, the goal of HDX is to make humanitarian data easy to find and use for analysis. Our growing collection of datasets has been accessed by millions of users in over 200 countries and territories. HDX is based on CKAN, an open-source data management system for powering data hubs and portals. The Centre has built a Python library to interact with the CKAN API to support a suite of scrapers that extract humanitarian data from remote files or APIs for upload as datasets into the portal and for use in visualisations.
Purpose and Scope of Assignment
The Centre is seeking to expand its team with a Data Engineer who has the skills and experience to investigate, clean and transform data sources, making them available in a form suitable for analysis, reporting and visualisation. We are looking for a candidate who is self-motivated, proactive, independent, and can thrive in an international, multidisciplinary team. The right candidate has the skills and abilities to develop both novel prototypes to fulfill immediate demands and robust solutions to satisfy longer term needs, to understand existing systems and update them to meet new requirements, and to think strategically about improvements to HDX’s data pipelines and processes.