International Consultant-Technical Support,Hanoi,Vietnam,Remotely,6 Months (Open For International Candidates) Req#595841

Overview

Support the National Statistics Office of Viet Nam in developing a national digital geospatial Enumeration Area (EA) framework for household surveys, while strengthening national capacity for its maintenance and future use.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and document a methodology for digital EA delineation.
• Define operational criteria for EA creation.
• Define and document the authoritative coordinate reference system and transformation workflow.
• Design a pilot of delineation of NSO’s selected EAs.
• Ensure consistency with international best practices for survey sampling frames.
• Review and assess geospatial datasets provided by NSO.
• Clean, harmonise, and prepare datasets required for EA delineation.
• Review transportation networks, waterways, and other geographic features.
• Assess requirements for updating population estimates and generating supporting population surfaces.
• Identify data gaps and recommend solutions.
• Agree on master sample areas covering various contexts.
• Define a documented data-readiness assessment.
• Ensure data preparation and analytical workflows can be reproduced using R and/or Python scripts.
• Develop measurable quality assurance and acceptance criteria.
• Specify mandatory validation technical and operational validation.
• Maintain a validation and decision log, refine workflow, and prepare final geospatial datasets, metadata, code, configuration files and QA outputs.
• Design and deliver a comprehensive five-day, in-person, hands-on training programme for NSO staff.
• Prepare a competency-based package enabling participants to understand, execute, compare, validate, modify and maintain the EA workflows.
• Structure the workshop broadly as follows: Day 1 - data architecture, readiness and preparation; Day 2 - concepts and demonstrations approaches; Day 3 - supervised implementation and comparison; Day 4 - QA, validation, metadata, classifications and refinement; Day 5 - production workflow, maintenance, code adaptation, governance, participant assessment and handover planning.
• Provide presentations, instructor and participant guides, step-by-step exercises, training datasets, expected outputs, troubleshooting notes, glossary, fully commented scripts or notebooks, and pre- and post-training competency assessments.
• Ensure participants have sufficient hands-on time to run, inspect, modify and troubleshoot the code.
• Transfer all editable source materials for internal reuse.
• Document all datasets, assumptions, methods, algorithms, parameters, decisions, workflows, exceptions, outputs and limitations.
• Deliver a structured reproducible source-code repository containing fully commented R and/or Python scripts or notebooks, configuration files, sample commands, package and environment specifications, data dictionaries, README files, folder structures, processing logs and troubleshooting guidance.
• Ensure that no essential step is available only through an undocumented manual action.
• Prepare practical recommendations for national implementation, institutional roles, approval, versioning, updates, change management, maintenance, staff competencies and future expansion.
• Present the comparative results and final workflow to UNICEF and the NSO.

Required Experience

• At least 8 years of progressively responsible experience in GIS, spatial statistics, census cartography, survey sampling frames, or geospatial population modelling.
• Demonstrated experience supporting development of digital Enumeration Areas (EAs), census cartography, master sampling frames, or geospatial survey infrastructure.
• Demonstrated experience delivering digital EA frameworks or census cartography modernization projects in at least two countries.
• Experience working with National Statistical Offices or similar government agencies.
• Prior experience supporting MICS, DHS, Census, LSMS, household surveys, or other large-scale sample surveys.
• Experience in developing geospatial methodologies for: EA delineation; population gridding/population estimation; integration of administrative and geospatial datasets; quality assurance of spatial datasets.
• Experience applying international standards such as DEGURBA, census geography, sampling frame development, or official statistics frameworks.
• Experience designing and delivering GIS capacity-building programmes and technical workshops.
• Experience working in Asia Pacific regions or developing-country contexts is highly desirable.

Qualifications

Geography, GIS, Geoinformatics, Geomatics, Cartography, Statistics, Demography, Spatial Data Science, Computer Science, or related fields.

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