Junior Data Scientist Volunteer

DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS

30 October 2025-23:59-GMT02:00 Eastern European Standard Time (Cairo)

WFP celebrates and embraces diversity. It is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunity for all its employees and encourages qualified candidates to apply irrespective of race colour national origin ethnic or social background genetic information gender gender identity and/or expression sexual orientation religion or belief HIV status or disability.

ABOUT WFP

The World Food Programme is the worlds largest humanitarian organization saving lives in emergencies and using food assistance to build a pathway to peace stability and prosperity for people recovering from conflict disasters and the impact of climate change.

At WFP people are at the heart of everything we do and the vision of the future WFP workforce is one of diverse committed skilled and high performing teams selected on merit operating in a healthy and inclusive work environment living WFPs values (Integrity Collaboration Commitment Humanity and Inclusion) and working with partners to save and change the lives of those WFP serves.

To learn more about WFP visit our website: follow us on social media to keep up with our latest news: YouTube LinkedIn Instagram Facebook Twitter TikTok.

WHY JOIN WFP

• WFP is a 2020 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.

• WFP offers a highly inclusive diverse and multicultural working environment.

• WFP invests in the personal & professional development of its employees through a range of training accreditation coaching mentorship and other programs as well as through internal mobility opportunities.

• A career path in WFP provides an exciting opportunity to work across the various country regional and global offices around the world and with passionate colleagues who work tirelessly to ensure that effective humanitarian assistance reaches millions of people across the globe.

• We offer an attractive compensation package (please refer to the Terms and Conditions section of this vacancy announcement).

Assisting more than 115.5 million people in 120 countries each year the World Food Program (WFP) is the leading humanitarian organization saving lives and changing lives delivering food assistance in emergencies and working with communities to improve nutrition and build resilience. As the international community has committed to end hunger achieve food security and improved nutrition by 2030 one in nine people worldwide still do not have enough to eat. Food and food-related assistance lie at the heart of the struggle to break the cycle of hunger and poverty.
WFPs Regional Bureau for the Middle East and Northern Africa (RBC) based in Cairo Egypt provides strategic guidance policy/technical support and direction to WFP operations and activities in 16 countries: Algeria Armenia Egypt Iran Iraq Jordan Lebanon Libya Moldova Morocco State of Palestine Syria Tunisia Turkey Ukraine and Yemen. These country offices aim to assist roughly one-third of all of WFPs beneficiaries (approx. 30 million) in some of the most critical humanitarian emergencies of our time. RBC is also active in the Changing Lives side of WFPs mandate helping national governments and local communities improve nutrition livelihoods school feeding social protection climate and disaster risk reduction and other programs that build resilience and support development.
This assignment is part of WFP RBCs Google AI sandbox initiative. This initiative creates a safe environment to pilot AI use cases relevant to RBC in coordination with HQ. This assignment is to support the identified regional AI use cases by evaluating benchmarking and supervising the fine-tuning of various AI models such as Gemini Llama and GPT-4. The selected candidate will also participate in evaluating the use of photos in WFP operations for the implementation of the Photo Deduplication CCI project.

Reporting to the senior data scientist in RBCs Data/AI team the junior data scientist will be responsible for provision of the following services in support of Photo deduplication and AI sandbox:

Identify state of the art AI models that fits the use cases at hand.

Train/retrain AI models with relevant annotated datasets.

Model Evaluation and Optimization: Assess model performance identify areas of improvement and fine-tune hyperparameters to optimize the models. Use techniques like grid search or Bayesian optimization for parameter tuning. Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA): Perform EDA to gain insights into the data identify patterns correlations and outliers. Use visualizations and statistical techniques to summarize and present the findings.

Feature Engineering: Create new features from existing data that can improve the performance of machine learning models. This includes feature extraction transformation and selection.

Natural Language Processing (NLP): Work on tasks related to text data such as sentiment analysis text classification or named entity recognition. Utilize NLP libraries like NLTK SpaCy or Transformers.

Collaboration and Documentation: Collaborate with team members document your work and maintain a clear and organized record of your analysis code and results. Contribute to the organizations knowledge base or data science repository.

Other tasks as required.

Education:

University degree in Computer Science or Data Science; or senior undergraduate of Computer Science or Data Science.

Experience:

Proficiency in programming languages such as Python or R is crucial for a data scientist.

Solid understanding of statistics is essential. The candidate should be familiar with concepts such as hypothesis testing regression analysis probability distributions and statistical modelling techniques.

Solid understanding of machine learning algorithms and techniques such as supervised and unsupervised learning feature engineering model evaluation and model selection.

Excellent oral and written skills; excellent drafting formulation reporting skills.

Excellent interpersonal skills; culturally and socially sensitive; ability to work inclusively and collaboratively with a range of partners including grassroots community members religious and youth organizations and authorities at different levels; familiarity with tools and approaches of communications for development.

Ability to work and adapt professionally and effectively in a challenging environment; ability to work effectively in a multicultural team of international and national personnel.

Self-motivated ability to work on MVPs in an agile environment; ability to work with tight deadlines.

Sound security awareness.

Have affinity with or interest in leveraging AI in humanitarian domain volunteerism as an enabler for durable development and the UN System.

Proficiency (read/ write/ speak) in English.

WFP LEADERSHIP FRAMEWORK

WFP Leadership Framework guides to the common standards of behavior that guide HOW we work together to accomplish our mission.

Click here to access WFP Leadership Framework

REASONABLE ACCOMMODATION

WFP is committed to supporting individuals with disabilities by providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process. If you require a reasonable accommodation please contact:

NO FEE DISCLAIMER

The United Nations does not charge any application processing training interviewing testing or other fee in connection with the application or recruitment process. Should you receive a solicitation for the payment of a fee please disregard it. Furthermore please note that emblems logos names and addresses are easily copied and reproduced. Therefore you are advised to apply particular care when submitting personal information on the web.

REMINDERS BEFORE YOU SUBMIT YOUR APPLICATION

• We strongly recommend that your profile is accurate complete and includes your employment records academic qualifications language skills and UN Grade (if applicable).

• Once your profile is completed please apply and submit your application.

• Please make sure you upload your professional CV in the English language

• Kindly note the only documents you will need to submit at this time are your CV and Cover Letter

• Additional documents such as passport recommendation letters academic certificates etc. may potentially be requested at a future time

• Please contact us at in case you face any challenges with submitting your application

• Only shortlisted candidates will be notified

All employment decisions are made on the basis of organizational needs job requirements merit and individual qualifications. WFP is committed to providing an inclusive work environment free of sexual exploitation and abuse all forms of discrimination any kind of harassment sexual harassment and abuse of authority. Therefore all selected candidates will undergo rigorous reference and background checks.

No appointment under any kind of contract will be offered to members of the UN Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions (ACABQ) International Civil Service Commission (ICSC) FAO Finance Committee WFP External Auditor WFP Audit Committee Joint Inspection Unit (JIU) and other similar bodies within the United Nations system with oversight responsibilities over WFP both during their service and within three years of ceasing that service.