Statistician

The Statistician will provide statistical expertise in the improvement and development of methods for food security and nutrition statistics, including data compilation, processing, validation, analysis, and dissemination. The role involves collaboration with external stakeholders and capacity building to support FAO's food security and nutrition data domains.

Responsibilities

• Collects, reviews, processes and/or analyses key social/economic/environmental indicators to support economic and social development programmes.
• Develops improved/updated technical, statistical and/or analytical tools, systems, databases.
• Conducts research, data collection, validation, analysis and/or reporting to support development of technical standards, international instruments, innovative tools and methodologies.
• Produces technical reports and provides input in technical documents, divisional publications and/or web pages.
• Provides technical and/or policy advice, assistance and solutions to Regional, Subregional and Country Offices, including technical backstopping to field projects.
• Participates in multidisciplinary teams, collaborates with other Divisions/Offices/Centres and promotes best practices.
• Provides capacity development services including planning and organization of training workshops and seminars.
• Participates in divisional teams, Organization-wide committees, project teams and working groups providing specialized expertise.
• Supports organization, conduct and follow-up of meetings, consultations and conferences, and development/production of required materials.
• Participates in resource mobilization activities in accordance with the Strategic Framework and divisional plans.
• Promotes international cooperation and collaboration, advocates best practices, knowledge sharing, increased policy dialogue and provides technical expertise at international meetings and conferences.
• Maintains and refines methodology and statistical tools to compute Prevalence of Food Insecurity based on FIES and other indicators.
• Contributes to development of analytic models and scoring strategies for FIES ensuring cross-country comparability and stability over time.
• Analyses results to identify inconsistencies in indicators and proposes strategies to address them.
• Maintains and extends analytic codes and statistical methods to analyse FIES data through Item Response Theory models.
• Reviews sampling frames of surveys used to inform food insecurity indicators and adjusts sampling weights if needed.
• Provides methodological guidance for improvement of other food security and nutrition indicators including PoU and PUA.
• Works on methodologies for data disaggregation and variance computation of food security and nutrition indicators.
• Undertakes and supports data analysis and dissemination activities.
• Conducts analyses of national datasets to determine potential for producing food insecurity prevalence estimates.
• Contributes to publication of divisional reports and scientific papers on FIES methodology and application.
• Conducts research on extending existing methods to different applications such as acute food insecurity monitoring, right to food, urban food security.
• Contributes to discussions among food security analysts providing guidance for analysis and interpretation of indicators.
• Disseminates and interprets results based on analysis of FIES data in various platforms and systems.
• Drafts sections of the State of Food Insecurity and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report concerning statistical data analysis and interpretation.
• Supports computation of regional aggregates of food security and nutrition indicators for dissemination.
• Provides technical assistance and capacity development on FIES-based and other food security indicators.
• Provides assistance for statistical analyses related to food security indicators to other teams, international agencies, NGOs and academicians.
• Provides technical assistance to national statistical offices for statistical analyses of food security data.
• Designs, tests and conducts capacity development activities on FAO software and modelling approach to assess access to food.
• Oversees development of web-based learning materials for software and model application for internal and external users.
• Provides statistical expertise/support to other members of the food security and nutrition statistics team as necessary.

Requirements

• Advanced university degree (Master’s degree or equivalent) in statistics, mathematics, economics, agricultural economics, or a related field.
• Five years of relevant experience in the compilation and analysis of food and agricultural statistics in national or international organizations with focus on the methodological development and production of food security statistics.
• Working knowledge (proficiency - level C) of English and intermediate knowledge (intermediate proficiency - level B) of another FAO official language (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian or Spanish).
• Work experience in more than one location or area of work, particularly in field positions.
• Strong command of statistical methods including: data presentation, analysis and descriptive statistics; main continuous and discrete random variables (binomial, normal, standard normal, log-normal) and their properties; probability distributions; conditional probability, probabilities of intersections of events, Bayes' theorem; correlation and rank correlation; sampling and sample size: simple, stratified, and multistage random sampling; Inference, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing and significance; linear regression (single and multiple) comparison of population means and variances, ANOVA; Chi-square and goodness of fit tests; nonlinear models: maximum likelihood estimation; elements of survey and questionnaire design.
• Extent and relevance of experience and knowledge of the main data sources used for the compilation of food security statistics.
• Extent and relevance of experience in the compilation, validation, and analysis of food security statistics.
• Extent and relevance of experience in software used for processing and analysing data, such as R, STATA, SPSS, SAS.
• Extent and relevance of statistical programming skills.
• Depth familiarity with relevant statistical methods for data analysis using Item Response Theory.
• Ability to analyse complex statistical-related issues.

Skills

• Food Security Statistics
• Statistical Methods
• Data Analysis
• Descriptive Statistics
• Probability distributions
• Sampling Techniques
• Hypothesis testing
• Linear Regression
• ANOVA
• Chi-square Tests
• Nonlinear Models
• Maximum Likelihood Estimation
• Survey Design
• Questionnaire Design
• Data Compilation
• Data Validation
• Statistical Programming
• STATA
• SPSS
• SAS
• Item Response Theory

Languages

English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, Spanish