.NET Web Developer – Global Immunization Budget Database Consultant - Ref#576787

UNICEF works in some of the world’s toughest places, to reach the world’s most disadvantaged children. To save their lives. To defend their rights. To help them fulfill their potential. 

Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone. 

And we never give up. 

For every child, hope.

 

Consultancy Title: .NET Web Developer – Global Immunization Budget Database Consultant

Section/Division/Duty Station: Programme Group, Division of Analysis, Planning & Monitor, Data Analytics, UNICEF NYHQ

Duration: December 20, 2024, to December 20, 2025

Home/ Office Based: NYHQ / Remote

 

About UNICEF

If you are a committed, creative professional and are passionate about making a lasting difference for children, the world's leading children's rights organization would like to hear from you. For 70 years, UNICEF has been working on the ground in 190 countries and territories to promote children's survival, protection and development. The world's largest provider of vaccines for developing countries, UNICEF supports child health and nutrition, good water and sanitation, quality basic education for all boys and girls, and the protection of children from violence, exploitation, and AIDS. UNICEF is funded entirely by the voluntary contributions of individuals, businesses, foundations and governments. UNICEF has over 12,000 staff in more than 145 countries.

 

BACKGROUND

Purpose of Activity/ Assignment:

Economic analysis of immunization resources constitutes an important area of work in support of countries' efforts to protect and increase domestic investments in immunization. However, challenges remain in identifying and analyzing immunization resources in domestic government budgets. There is substantial variation in how information on vaccine procurement and immunization delivery is presented in national budget documents across different countries, and even year-to-year for a given country. Often this information is only available in non-searchable PDF files, which complicates identification and analysis. Improving the accessibility of immunization budget information and supporting its interpretation through the provision of standardized analysis and data visualizations can provide insights and evidence to strengthen advocacy at a global, regional, and country level around sustainable immunization financing. 

The solution is the Global Immunization Budget Database (GIBD), a custom .NET web-based application powered by AI and machine learning models, designed to standardize and analyze global immunization budget data for insightful cross-country comparison and trend analysis. GIBD enables UNICEF to access global immunization budget data via a web browser, secured with UNICEF credentials for global reach and data protection. It utilizes artificial intelligence to tackle complex data extraction and manipulation challenges and offers dashboards designed for insightful trend visualization, supported by automated analysis for strategic decision-making.

UNICEF requires the services of an external consultant to support additional development of GIBD, geared towards making GIBD a robust enterprise-level product, capable of accommodating extensive data analysis requirements. The focus is on extending its functionalities to support new features like multi-lingual datasets and numerical systems different from the decimal system. The work shall create maintainable, automated processes to perform data extraction from unstructured data sources and harmonize multiple data streams into a central database. The work shall be designed such that it can accommodate the addition of new streams of data as and when they become available.

The consultant shall interact with the Frontier Data and Tech Unit (FDTU) and the Program Group Immunization Team (PGI) to gather data and software requirements. The consultant shall also research and test potential methods for improving existent AI solutions and increase the precision of automatic data extraction from unstructured files.

There is lack of funding to cover all planned activities that continue until the end of 2025. Some deliverables are planned to be completed if additional resources become available.

 

Scope of Work:

The consultant will be expected to take on the following duties:

• Facilitate with relevant stakeholders including UNICEF staff, other UN agencies, development partners, and government officials for overall planning and development of the database and the related software components.
• Design of a data model and database schema for the immunization budget data