ET Consultant – Data Scientist/Applied Economist

At the World Bank, a member of the World Bank Group (WBG), you’ll join a diverse, global community working across cultures, disciplines, and borders to address the world’s most pressing development challenges. With 1.2 billion young people reaching working age in the decade ahead, the challenge of job creation has never been greater. Through partnerships across 145 countries and more than 182 offices worldwide, we work with governments, private sector, development partners and other stakeholders to invest in people, strengthen markets, and deliver scalable, data-driven solutions that generate more and better jobs and improve lives. For more information, visit https://www.worldbank.org/en/who-we-are/ibrd Who We Are The World Bank Group (WBG) is one of the world's largest sources of funding and knowledge for developing countries. Its five institutions share a commitment to reducing poverty, increasing shared prosperity, and promoting sustainable development. The Finance, Competition and Investment (FCI) Global Practice combines financial sector expertise with private sector development expertise to help countries build competitive markets, mobilize private capital, and create sustainable, better-paying jobs. FCI's work spans financial stability and integrity, financial inclusion and access, long-term finance, crisis and disaster risk finance, investment climate reform, trade and regional integration, and the facilitation of private capital, with climate, gender, and digitalization as cross-cutting priorities. This position sits within EAWF2, the FCI unit supporting the Africa West and Central (AFW) Region across three Country Management Units: Ghana+ (Ghana, Liberia, and Sierra Leone), Nigeria, and the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (CEMAC, comprising Cameroon, Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon). Across these countries, EAWF2 helps governments expand access to finance for micro, small, and medium enterprises, strengthen financial institutions and regional financial integration, promotes entrepreneurship, and designs policies and programs to promote firm capabilities and technology adoption, advance investment climate and business environment reforms, and design programs that channel private investment toward job creation, particularly for youth and women. The team pursues this agenda through a mix of lending operations, analytics, and advisory services; working closely with government counterparts, IFC, and MIGA to ground policy dialogue and project design in rigorous, firm-level and macro-financial evidence. What You Will Do As an Extended Term Consultant – Data Scientist/Applied Economist on the EAWF2 team, you will work at the intersection of applied research and operations, helping the team translate data and analysis into decisions that shape how projects are designed, how policy dialogue is conducted, and how results are communicated to clients and management. In practice, this means your work will directly inform which reforms get prioritized in a country program, how a lending operation is structured to reach underserved firms and households, and how the team demonstrates the jobs and private capital mobilization impact of its portfolio. You will contribute to: ● Diagnostics and evidence generation: producing firm-level and macro-financial analysis that identifies binding constraints to private sector growth and shapes the design of new lending operations and advisory engagements across the Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and CEMAC programs ● Firm-level data analytics: work with large firm-level datasets as well as trade data to perform just-in-time analytics as well as deeper applied research projects ● Narrative and communication of results: drafting analytical notes, background papers, and evidence-based narratives that make the case for reforms and investments to clients, and that demonstrate the portfolio's contribution to job creation and private capital mobilization to management and donors ● Operational support: contributing to the preparation and supervision of lending operations as well as analytical and advisory engagements, so that technical findings are reflected in project design and implementation is informed by real-time evidence ● Knowledge synthesis: helping connect research findings and country diagnostics to operational recommendations, ensuring that lessons from one country or instrument inform the design of others across the unit's portfolio ● Client and partner engagement: preparing briefs, presentations, and inputs used directly in dialogue with management, government counterparts, and development partners, and coordinating with regional and global FCI teams, IFC, and MIGA to keep the team's work aligned with the broader World Bank Group private sector development agenda ● Financial sector monitoring: tracking financial stability and access to finance developments and reforms in all client countries, producing regular PowerPoint presentations, and liaising with the global teams to perfect monitoring tools and methodologies.