Strengthen Community Education Through Data and Digital Learning in Cameroon

Host entity: Goodness and Mercy Missions

Application deadline: 05/10/2026

Mission and objectives

Goodness and Mercy Missions (GMM) is a nonprofit organization founded in 2007 by Teh Francis Yai, based in the North West Region of Cameroon. GMM's mission is to strengthen rural communities by providing essential tools, skills, and opportunities to underserved populations, enabling them to build sustainable and resilient lives. GMM works to break cycles of poverty through education, economic empowerment, and community development, with a focus on long-term, community-driven impact. The organization was born from the founder's personal experience growing up in a polygamous household with limited resources, where cultural barriers to women's financial independence nearly interrupted his own education. This experience shaped GMM's core priorities: empowering rural women to achieve financial autonomy and guaranteeing children's access to education. Since 2017, GMM has held Special Consultative Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), reflecting its commitment to international standards in humanitarian and development work. GMM's programs span school sponsorship, women's empowerment, computer training, library services, school construction, solar energy distribution, peace building, and relief aid delivery. The organization operates primarily in the Boyo Division of the North West Region, with activities extending to the West, South West, Littoral, and Centre Regions of Cameroon. GMM's core values include participatory strategy, sustainability, equity and non-discrimination, accountability, partnership cooperation, empowerment, and inclusion. Through partnerships with representative organizations and online volunteer support, GMM seeks to leverage global expertise to develop community-based, culturally appropriate programs that can be implemented by local staff and community facilitators on the ground.

Assignment context

Education programmes in the North West Region of Cameroon operate in a data-poor environment. The Anglophone crisis has displaced families, interrupted school calendars, and forced learning to move between damaged school buildings, host communities, and home-based arrangements, which means that records of who is learning, where, and with what result are fragmented across paper registers, facilitator notebooks, and unconnected spreadsheets. In the Boyo Division, where GMM is headquartered, programme staff can describe their work in detail but cannot easily answer the questions that determine whether a programme continues: which learners stop attending and at what point, which training sessions change facilitator practice, and which learning resource reaches the largest number of households at the lowest cost. At the same time, most learning and training materials exist only in formats that assume a printer, a laptop, or stable connectivity, none of which are reliably available in rural and crisis-affected communities where a shared low-end smartphone is often the only device in a household.This gap limits GMM's progress toward Sustainable Development Goal 4 and weakens its position when reporting to partners and applying for funding, since evidence of results cannot be assembled quickly or consistently. Goodness and Mercy Missions, as a community-rooted organization with ECOSOC consultative status and extensive experience in school sponsorship, computer training, and community development, recognizes that a simple and locally maintainable evidence and digital resource base is now as important to its education work as the programmes themselves. Through online volunteer support, GMM seeks to leverage global expertise in data analysis, digital learning design, and knowledge management to build tools that local staff and community facilitators can operate, update, and extend without external technical support, so that ownership of both the data and the learning resources remains with the people who understand the culture, the languages (English and Pidgin English), and the realities of the North West Region. The assignment is fully home-based and desk-based. Volunteers work with anonymized and aggregated material provided by GMM together with publicly available data, and do not contact community members directly.

Task description

Volunteer 1 -2 Education Data Consolidation and Needs Assessment. Review the education and community programme records shared by GMM and document their structure, coverage, and quality problems; design a standardized data schema, a field-level data collection template, and a codebook that GMM staff can apply to future activities; clean, deduplicate, and merge historical records into one consolidated dataset while keeping a written log of every transformation so that the work is reproducible; and conduct a desk review of community education needs in comparable rural and crisis-affected settings in Sub-Saharan Africa to place GMM's own figures in context.

Volunteer 3-4 - Data Analysis, Indicators and Visualization. Define an indicator framework for access, participation, retention, and training effectiveness that is aligned with SDG 4 targets and with what GMM can realistically measure; analyse the consolidated dataset to identify participation trends, drop-off points, and differences by age group, gender, and locality; build a lightweight dashboard or reporting workbook that programme staff can refresh with new data using free and widely available tools; and prepare a documented method note and analytical findings summary with clearly labelled charts, so that the analysis can be repeated by staff or by a future volunteer cohort.

Volunteer 5-6 - Digital and Low-Bandwidth Learning Resources. Review GMM's existing learning and training materials and recommend which items to prioritize for digital conversion; convert the selected materials into accessible, small-file, offline-capable formats that remain legible on low-end mobile devices; develop a reusable template set covering facilitator guides, learner handouts, and a simple visual style guide adapted to English and Pidgin English use; and write a short how-to guide enabling GMM staff and community facilitators to produce further materials locally in the same format.

Volunteer 7-8 - Documentation, Knowledge Management and Partnership Support. Maintain the shared work plan, coordinate the team's weekly online check-in, and track deliverables against the four-week timeline; quality assure all outputs for internal consistency, plain language, and source accuracy, verifying that ever statistic and citation used by the team is traceable to a verifiable source; draft the synthesis report that brings the four workstreams into one narrative written for programme managers and prospective partners; and prepare a handover pack, including file structure, open questions, lessons learned, and recommended next steps, together with a short mapping of potential funding and partnership opportunities for which the new evidence base can be used.All four volunteers submit a brief written progress update each week, deliver their files in the shared folder structure agreed at onboarding, and provide a source list in which each statistic, dataset, and reference is accompanied by a DOI or a working URL. Unverifiable or fabricated sources are grounds for ending the assignment. No personally identifiable information about learners, families, or facilitators may be requested, stored, re-identified, or reproduced in any output, and no output may contain information that could expose the identity or location of individual participants, in particular women and children in crisis-affected communities.

Skills and experience

1. Bachelor's degree, or current enrolment as an undergraduate or graduate student, in data science, statistics, computer science, information systems, education, instructional design, community development, or a related field.
2. Demonstrated practical experience relevant to the chosen role, through coursework, research projects, competitions, internships, or prior volunteer work. Formal professional experience is welcome but is not a requirement for this assignment.3. For Volunteers 1 and 2, working ability in data cleaning, analysis, and visualization using Python, R, SQL, or advanced spreadsheet and business intelligence tools, together with the discipline to document and version control one's own work.4.
For Volunteer 3, skills in document design, instructional material preparation, or mobile-friendly and offline-capable digital formats, with attention to accessibility and file size constraints in low-bandwidth settings.5. For Volunteer 4, strong writing, editing, and coordination skills, including experience managing a small team or academic group project and familiarity with reference management.6. Experience with, or clear interest in, education and community development programmes in developing country contexts, preferably Sub-Saharan Africa or conflict-affected settings.7. Strong written communication skills, essential for remote collaboration, and proficiency in virtual collaboration tools with reliable internet access.8. Fluency in English; knowledge of French or Pidgin English is an asset.9. Cultural sensitivity, attention to data protection and do-no-harm principles, and the ability to adapt materials and analysis for diverse local contexts, including crisis-affected communities.

Full eligibility requirements, conditions of service and application instructions are available on the official UNV platform.