E T Consultant at World Bank Group

Job Description

The Urban Development and Disaster Risk Management Unit for Eastern and Southern Africa (IAEU3) support resilient, inclusive, and job-creating urbanization across a region facing rapid population growth, climate risks, and fragility. The unit works with governments to design and implement programs that strengthen municipal systems, improve infrastructure and service delivery, and integrate disaster and climate resilience into urban development. Its portfolio combines investment lending, technical assistance, and analytical work focused on risk-informed planning, resilient infrastructure, and stronger local institutions. The unit also advances innovation through geospatial analytics and digital platforms, including the SPARC (Smart Parcel Atlas for Resilient Cities). Across its engagements, IAEU3 promotes approaches that link climate resilience and urban development to jobs, private investment, and inclusive growth.

Duties and accountabilities:  

• The consultant will provide decision-oriented geospatial analysis to support urban investment prioritization, infrastructure planning, resilience diagnostics, and institutional strengthening across the Kenya and Somalia urban portfolios. Outputs must be usable for lending preparation, implementation support, policy dialogue, public-sector data systems, and government decision cycles. Decision-grade geospatial analytics means that each output must:
• Identify the operational decision it informs;
• Document data sources, dates, processing steps, assumptions, and limitations;
• Distinguish observed data, modeled estimates, and inferred results;
• Include uncertainty, confidence ratings, or validation limits where relevant;
• Be reproducible through documented workflows, scripts, notebooks, or processing logs;
• Convert spatial findings into clear implications for investment prioritization, sequencing, institutional ownership, project design, or emergency preparedness.

Selection Criteria

• Masters degrees in GIS, geospatial data science, geography, urban planning, transport planning, disaster risk management, information systems, remote sensing, or a related field.
• At least 5 years of hands-on professional experience in geospatial analysis applied to urban, infrastructure, land, transport, DRM, or related sectors.
• Demonstrated experience advising governments or development institutions on spatial analytics, risk dashboards, data platforms, or decision-support systems.
• Strong technical skills in QGIS or ArcGIS and geospatial processing in Python, R, or Google Earth Engine.
• Experience with remote sensing products, Earth Observation data interpretation, and spatial data QA/QC.
• Experience producing client-facing technical outputs, including maps, technical notes, dashboards or dashboard layers, data packages, and short decision memos.
• Familiarity with public-sector data systems, data governance, data stewardship, and institutional sustainability.
• Experience in Sub-Saharan Africa, with direct exposure to urban, resilience, infrastructure, or municipal programming.