AI and Data Platforms Lead (1 year contract)

Background

The African Climate Foundation (ACF) is the first and only African-led climate change re-granting organisation on the continent. Through a combination of grant making, fellowships, transformational research, technical assistance, coalition building and advocacy the ACF seeks to support interventions at the nexus of climate change, and development that have the greatest potential to deliver long-term socio-economic transformation and inclusive development. ACF also provides Fiscal Hosting (also called Fiscal Sponsorship) services to support emerging and mission aligned organisations and initiatives

All African countries should have the capacities, resources, and tools to shape their own energy transitions. African Energy Futures (AEF), housed within the African Climate Foundation , will fund African institutions to build energy systems knowledge and tools that meet African needs; train the rising generation of African energy system analysts; strengthen local energy policy and decision-making; and ensure Africa plays a greater role in shaping energy research, policy, and investment.
Purpose

The African Climate Foundation (ACF) and African Energy Futures (AEF) are establishing a shared Strategic Data & Intelligence Unit to improve how African energy and development data are gathered, governed, analysed, visualised and used.

The unit will build and maintain an online data visualisation platform, develop compelling evidence-based narratives that can shift public and policy understanding, and provide strategic analytical services to grant-making and regranting organisations. It will work closely with Ember during the platform’s initial development, while progressively building independent African capability in data infrastructure, analysis and storytelling.

The initial four-person team is intentionally multidisciplinary. It combines strategic intelligence and philanthropy engagement, applied artificial intelligence and platform development, rigorous data science and governance, and sustained hands-on data acquisition and cleaning.
Scope of the role

Reporting to the Project Director, the AI & Data Platforms Lead will design and deliver the digital and AI-enabled capabilities of the unit. The role combines product thinking, data engineering, applied AI and practical software development. You will work with Ember and other partners to develop the online data storage and visualisation platform, create efficient data workflows, and identify responsible AI applications that improve research, grant-making, communications and knowledge management across ACF and AEF. This is an applied role: the successful candidate must be able to move from experimentation to reliable tools that colleagues can use.

Responsibilities include but not limited to:
Platform and product development

- Lead the technical design, development and iterative improvement of the online data platform and visualisation tools.

- Translate user needs into a prioritised product roadmap, prototypes, specifications and tested releases.

- Work with Ember to adapt or integrate relevant platform components while building a pathway to independent ACF-AEF capability.

- Design for accessibility, low-bandwidth use, maintainability, multilingual expansion and responsible open access where appropriate.

- Implement analytics, usage monitoring and user-feedback processes to improve product relevance.

Data engineering and architecture

- Design scalable data ingestion, transformation, storage, metadata, versioning and publishing pipelines.

- Integrate structured and unstructured data from public, partner and internal sources using APIs, automated workflows and documented manual processes.

- Collaborate with the Junior Data Scientist to implement validation, provenance, reproducibility, access control and release standards.

- Maintain technical documentation, source-code repositories, testing processes, backups and business-continuity arrangements.

Applied AI