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Organizational Context & Job Purpose:
Over more than a decade, Syria has faced a relentless crisis that has driven hunger and humanitarian needs to unprecedented heights. The convergence of ongoing insecurity, widespread displacement, economic deterioration, infrastructural damage, and inadequate basic services has severely heightened vulnerability among men, women, and children. According to the 2023 Humanitarian Needs Overview (HNO), a staggering 12.9 million people, or 55% of the population, are food insecure, including 3.1 million facing severe food insecurity. Additionally, 2.6 million people are at imminent risk of becoming food insecure. In today's Syria, the minimum wage can only afford a fifth of a family's food needs.
WFP Syria is in a period of transition from large, blanket, in-kind GFA programmes to tightly targeted, multi-modality emergency assistance and increasing portfolio of nutrition, livelihoods, and early recovering programming. But donor funds are declining. Fewer staff need to collaborate with greater agility across multiple business units and functions to plan and implement operations more efficiently and effectively.
Meanwhile WFP is progressively digitizing more and more core business processes across all functions – finance, funds management, supply chain management, beneficiary Identity management, programme distribution management, VAM and MnE, CP management, HR, etc. With support from TEC, the transaction data generated by all these different digitized processes can be increasingly pooled, cleaned, transformed, and analyzed to bring rapid and more granular insight into WFP operations.
WFP’s risk strategy is essentially to ensure segregations of duty, digitize business processes, and leverage data analytics to detect and then mitigate large-scale or systematic risks.
The Operations Planning, Assurance and Coordination (OPAC) leads internal calibration of all the workstreams set in place to address the above considerations. The OPAC is essentially the “single source of truth” to plan, assure, and coordinate optimal and risk-assured implementation of operations in the field. OPAC being a forward looking & scenario planning office that will ensure that current emergency response and possible future emergency scenario are integrated in the planning so as to best manage implementation of programmes and in continuity of operations at any given time.
The OPAC is comprised of four fluid and mutually reinforcing teams – Budget and Programming (BPU), Assurance Analytics, Operation Information Management (OIM) and Operations Coordination. The Senior Business Analyst will lead Assurance Analytics including the end-to-end design and implementation of analytical products, including dashboards and advanced analysis, while coaching and mentoring analysts.
Contract Details:
Contract Type: Service Contract.
Duration: 12 Months.
Duty Station: Damascus.
Number of required employees: 1
The Programme Policy Officer (Senior Business Analyst) will be based in Damascus, Syria and will be under the direct supervision of the Head of OPAC and will supervise one Programme Associate (Junior Analyst) to:
1.Use data and data insights to:
Contribute to formulation of WFP-wide programme policies in line with both organizational strategy and the practical realities of operating in the field; or translate programme policy into country level practices. Developing programme guidance and implementation modalities and operations, to ensure a clear and strong connection between HQ and field operations.
Provide advice and support to Syria CO Management, Heads of Units & Field Offices on moderately complex issues to clarify ambiguities and ensure that policy and programme operations are consistent with WFP policies, Executive Board decisions, and other relevant guidance.
Establish and maintain operational partnerships to identify opportunities for collaborative approaches and initiatives that improve assistance packages and support advocacy work.
Support proposal development and donor reporting with quantitative evidence and data narratives.
2.Analytics Ontology and Visual Branding: Lead the process documentation and user guide development in alignment with corporate visualization standards for OPAC products catalogue. Simplify complex OPAC routine and ad-hoc analytical products into user-friendly visualizations and summaries, ensuring an optimal balance between actionable insights and user experience.
3.Data Governance: Ensure compliance with WFP’s data governance, privacy, and security policies, safeguarding sensitive data and maintaining ethical standards in data usage, cleaning protocols, and metadata documentation.
4.Stakeholder Engagement and Customer Relations: Serve as the primary liaison between stakeholders and OPAC, gathering inputs to translate them into actionable business requirements. Collaborate with TEC on data product development, testing, and deployment.
5.Management Dashboard and Information Integration: Translate ambiguous operational challenges into structured data questions, using exploratory and predictive techniques. Leveraging Syria’s Modern Data Platform, maintain and enhance Syria’s management dashboard, expanding its capabilities to cater to evolving needs of managers and operational teams. Foster strong linkages across OPAC streams—BPU, OIM, and Operations Coordination—by ensuring that analytics-driven insights are readily available to feature internal and external communications and advocacy materials.
6.Advanced Business Analytics: Collaborate with BPU, Finance, Supply Chain, Compliance, Programme and field teams to develop “what-if” scenarios and forecasting models. Focusing on operation planning and implementation, funds requirements, and spending metrics to support informed decision-making.
7.Reporting: Oversee the planning, production of Assurance, Anticipatory and Early warning reports aligned with management and operations KPIs (i.e.: CBT and In-Kind reconciliation and anomaly detection).
8.Capacity Building, Team Management & Knowledge sharing: Effectively supervise junior analysts by providing guidance and coaching, fostering skills development and ensuring high-quality deliverables. Foster team cohesion & harmonious workplace environment within Business Analysis sub-team and overall OPAC unit. Facilitate regular knowledge-sharing sessions (e.g., brown-bag events) to promote OPAC services and improve user engagement and represent the OPAC in technical working groups and data forums as needed
9.Any other duties as required
Standard Minimum Qualifications
Education:
Advanced university degree (Master’s or equivalent) in Data Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Economics, Public Health, Computer Science, or a related quantitative field. Or first university degree with additional years of related work experience.
With a master’s degree: At least five (5) years of professional experience, or a bachelor’s degree with At least seven (7) years in data analysis, business intelligence, or monitoring & evaluation, ideally in humanitarian, development settings or private sectors with focus on the following:
- Proven leadership of full-cycle analytical projects — from scoping to deployment and continuous iteration.
- Demonstrated experience managing or mentoring multidisciplinary analytics or information management teams.
- Experience in formulating concept notes and policies as well as operational documents.
- Track record of using data to inform real-time humanitarian response, strategy design, or programme evaluation.
Technical Proficiency & Tools :
Candidates must demonstrate hands-on experience with the following platforms and tools:
- Data Analysis & Programming
Proficient in Python and/or R for statistical analysis and reporting.
Strong command of SQL (PostgreSQL, Athena, BigQuery, or similar) for querying large, complex datasets.
Experience building automated scripts, ETL flows, or reproducible workflows
- Data Visualization & Dashboarding
Advanced skill in Tableau (preferred), Power BI - with at least 3+ complete dashboards designed and delivered independently.
Understanding of dashboard UX/UI principles, drill-down filtering, performance optimization, and stakeholder-driven design.
Ability to manage the full dashboard lifecycle: scoping KPIs, prototyping, design iteration, deployment, user training, and versioning.
- Documentation & Version Control
Comfortable with Git/GitHub for code versioning and collaboration.
Maintains proper documentation of code, workflows, and analytical decisions for reusability and audit purposes.
Other Desirables:
Experience working with geospatial data and tools (e.g., QGIS, ArcGIS, Google Earth Engine).
Exposure to predictive analytics, machine learning, or text analytics (e.g., humanitarian feedback loops, risk detection).
Language:
Fluency (level C) in English language and Arabic.
نصيحة لحمايتك
ننصح بقراءة طريقة التقديم بعناية و التقيد بتعليمات التقدم للوظائف و المناقصات.