Location: Cape Town (Remote considered for candidates based on the African continent), South Africa
The African Climate Foundation (ACF), Africa's first African-led climate change re-granting organisation, 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.
Reporting to the Project Director, the Junior Data Scientist will provide sustained hands-on work turning fragmented and inconsistent information into reliable, usable datasets: locating data, obtaining and organising source files, cleaning and reconciling records, maintaining metadata, running quality checks, supporting analysis, and preparing charts and tables. Responsibilities include data discovery and acquisition (cataloguing public, academic, commercial and partner datasets across African countries, maintaining a source register), data cleaning and preparation (standardising and merging datasets, reconciling country names/units/currencies/dates, identifying duplicates and inconsistencies, updating metadata and data dictionaries), analysis and visualisation support (producing descriptive statistics, tables, charts and maps, replicating published calculations, supporting country profiles and dashboards), and platform/team support (testing datasets on the platform, maintaining shared repositories and documentation, participating in training and peer review).
Requirements: Bachelor's degree in statistics, economics, data science, computer science, engineering, geography, energy or development studies; at least 1-3 years relevant experience including internships or research assistantships; working proficiency in Python or R and spreadsheets, with SQL familiarity strongly preferred; practical experience cleaning and analysing real-world datasets; high accuracy and organisation; good written and verbal English communication.
Desirable: experience with African public data, energy statistics or geospatial information; familiarity with Git, notebooks, APIs, Power BI/Tableau; experience extracting data from PDFs.
Contract duration: 12 months, renewable. Start date: immediate.
Closing date: 4 October 2026.
HOW TO APPLY:
Apply via the BambooHR job listing link. Applicants must have the legal right to work in the country where they are based.
https://africanclimatefoundation.bamboohr.com/careers/138