Junior Professional Associate

The World Bank Group is one of the largest sources of funding and knowledge for developing countries; a unique global partnership of five institutions dedicated to ending extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity. With 189 member countries and more than 120 offices worldwide, we work with public and private sector partners, investing in groundbreaking projects and using data, research, and technology to develop solutions to the most urgent global challenges. For more information, visit <www.worldbank.org>. Poverty and Equity Global Practice: The Poverty Equity Global Practice is a family of empirical micro-economists with deep expertise in household surveys, analysis of distributional impacts of policies, poverty measurement, and broad experience in using household and other "micro" data to inform the design and implementation of policies and programs to create jobs, increase household incomes, reduce poverty and enhance shared prosperity. We work with government and external partners, at the country-level and globally, in ensuring their efforts to eliminate extreme poverty and promote shared prosperity are enhanced by integrative empirically-grounded analyses of household welfare. Internally, we work with country, regional and global teams across all practices to operationalize the twin goals of the WBG by providing robust evidence base and analytics using micro data. The Poverty and Equity Global Practice delivers the following to our clients in support of these critical development challenges: • Advice and knowledge to help better understand the relationship between growth, household income, poverty, and inequality. • Diagnostics helping identify key policies and multisectoral solutions that effectively reduce poverty and benefit the less well-off. • Monitoring and evaluation of policies and programs to enhance the poverty impact of interventions and inform mid-stream correction. • Monitoring and tracking poverty and other welfare outcomes. • Capacity-building and knowledge sharing (in client countries and within the WBG) of distributional impacts analytics. • Innovative data collection and measurement methods that can help fill crucial data gaps. LAC VPU Context: The World Bank Group serves 33 client countries in Latin America and the Caribbean Region (LCR). Clients range from large rapidly growing sophisticated middle-income clients to IDA countries to small Caribbean states to one fragile state, and to varying degrees face three key challenges – low productivity and growth, low quality jobs and low resilience to shocks. The region is tackling these challenges with a strong WBG approach, underpinned by selectivity and complementarity between the value added of public and private arms, and in strong partnership with relevant regional development partners. A. The challenge of low growth. After a brief post-pandemic rebound, the region has returned to slow growth and low productivity, with GDP growth around 2.2% in 2023–2024 and a medium-term outlook of 2.5%. LAC remains highly unequal, where the bottom 50% earn far less than the top 10%, and children from the poorest 20% are much less productive than those from the richest 20%. B. The challenge of quality jobs: the need for better quality jobs is paramount, with 6.2% unemployment rates, these low levels mask a deeper issue of job quality. Reflecting stagnating living standards, labor earnings have only grown by 1% or less per year in most countries over the past decade, and some 19% of workers in the region are earning incomes below the poverty line. C. The challenge of vulnerability to shocks. Building resilience of the countries to shocks, including natural disasters, through contingent financing and other innovative risk management platforms at country and regional levels is critical given the high exposure to climate–related disasters and natural hazards. Central America and the Caribbean have recurrent hurricanes that have impacts on GDP significantly higher than the regional average of 1.7%. Several countries are experiencing deep, long droughts, increasingly intense storms, and floods that disrupt economic activities and affect livelihoods, with impacts on the most vulnerable populations. Scope of Work: The Poverty and Equity Global Practice (GP) in the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) Region seeks to hire Junior Professional Associate (JPA) based in Bogotá, Colombia, to contribute to its analytical and operational work program. The JPA will support the Statistical Capacity Task Team and work closely with country and sector teams across the region. The JPA will serve as a core member of the STATS Poverty Team and will be responsible for the following activities: 1) Conduct data management and statistical analysis using household surveys and World Bank datasets and tools (including datalibweb), as well as data from administrative and other complementary sources. 2) Support the expansion, improvement, reproducibility and documentation of harmonization protocols and analytical tools for poverty, jobs, equity, and geospatial analytics in the LAC region, ensuring consistency and replicability across countries and analytical products. 3) Provide inputs to technical notes, methodological documentation, and presentations related to monetary poverty, labor market outcomes, multidimensional poverty, and inequality. 4) Contribute to the implementation of economic analysis of the distributional effects of shocks and policy reforms, including microsimulation and related analytical approaches, in close collaboration with task teams and country economists. 5) Support the dissemination of analytical findings through a variety of formats, including inputs to regional briefs, policy research papers, technical and policy notes, presentations, and participation in workshops, conferences, and internal knowledge events. 6) Support resource mobilization efforts by contributing to the preparation of funding proposals and concept notes for internal and external trust funds and research grants. In addition, as part of the Poverty and Equity GP, JPA will provide support on other tasks as required by the Practice Manager and/or Task Team Leaders (TTLs). This may include just-in-time collaboration with the Chief Economist Office and across the unit, such as supporting other TTLs on microsimulation-based distributional analysis and contributing to the maintenance and updating of existing or new analytical dashboards.