Part-Time Policy Lens Consultant

About the role

The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) seeks a part‑time consultant to design and pilot a Policy Lens framework that extracts structured, comparable data from policy documents across several member states. The assignment is a six‑month feasibility pilot focusing on one policy domain and three to five countries.

Key responsibilities

• Design a taxonomy of policy lenses (descriptive, causal, gap‑detection) and define extraction schemas.
• Apply political‑neutrality safeguards to ensure outputs support regional learning rather than country scorecards.
• Select and scope a pilot corpus of English‑language policy documents from the Arab Development Portal and other ESCWA sources.
• Build a simple extraction pipeline using LLM APIs, integrating existing metadata and indicator data.
• Generate structured outputs (tables, visualisations) and coordinate expert validation of results.
• Document code, schemas, prompts and provide recommendations for integration with ESCWA’s Mustashar and Naseej systems.

Required profile

• Master’s degree in computer science, data science, computational linguistics, public policy, economics or related field; PhD desirable.
• At least five years of progressive experience in applied NLP, LLM‑based systems or data science, with proven ability to build extraction pipelines.
• Demonstrated experience with policy document analysis, Theory of Change frameworks or SDG indicators is a plus.
• Fluency in English (spoken, written, read, understood).

Required skills

• Python programming.
• LLM APIs and prompt engineering.
• NLP toolkits for information extraction.
• Schema‑constrained generation and data structuring.