Data Analyst

SmartStart South Africa; Johannesburg; On-site; ZAR 300,000 - 450,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading organization dedicated to early learning is seeking a Data Analyst to drive data analysis and insights generation. This role involves conducting analyses, ensuring data quality, and enabling data-driven decisions to support organizational growth. Ideal candidates will possess a Bachelor's degree and strong analytical skills, with proficiency in Excel, SQL, and data visualization tools like Power BI and Tableau.

Benefits

Professional development opportunities

Flexible working hours

Support for further studies

Qualifications

• Minimum of 2 years of experience in data analysis.
• Strong quantitative and analytical skills.
• Proficiency in Excel and SQL databases.

Responsibilities

• Conduct data analysis to support strategic decision-making.
• Identify patterns and trends in data for reports.
• Support teams to improve data capturing and quality assurance.

Skills

Data Analysis

Statistical Principles

Attention to Detail

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Statistics, Social Sciences, or related field

Tools

Excel

SQL

Stata

R

SPSS

Power BI

Tableau

Job description

Key Responsibilities

Data Analysis and Insights Generation

• Conduct data analysis to support strategic decision-making and programme improvements.
  
• Respond to data requests from programme teams and leadership.
  
• Conduct routine data checks to ensure data integrity.
  
• Identify patterns and trends in data and provide clear summaries for different audiences.
  
• Support the preparation of data insights briefs and reports.
  
• Create, enhance and support the use of interactive dashboards and analytics tools to improve data-driven decision-making across the organisation and network.
  

Supporting Organisational Learning and Adaptive Strategy

• Assist with enabling teams to leverage insights for learning and programme improvement.
  
• Contribute to rapid experimentation by supporting data collection and analysis processes.
  
• Support the delivery of basic data literacy training across the organisation to improve data engagement and interpretation.
  
• Support teams to improve data capturing, quality assurance and related processes.
  
• Translate data insights into accessible formats for programme teams and leadership.
  

Research and Evaluation Support

• Support the Senior Data Analyst and Research team with research design, data analysis, and interpretation.
  
• Assist in co-conceptualising and co-creating research and evaluation questions, studies, and terms of reference.
  
• Provide input into research reports and recommendations.
  

Data Governance and Quality Assurance

• Enable and support data governance processes, including data availability, accessibility, integrity, quality (including accuracy, consistency, and reliability), usability, security, and compliance (in collaboration with IT and legal teams).
  
• Assist with regular data cleaning and quality checks to ensure high data integrity.
  
• Conduct assessments of key data assets and identify potential risks or gaps, including data process mapping.
  
• Maintain and update metadata to ensure consistent and accurate data management.
  
• Monitor data hygiene and escalate discrepancies to senior team members.
  

Requirements

Key Person Specifications

Essential Skills and Experience

• A minimum of a Bachelor’s degree in Statistics, Social Sciences, Economics, Mathematics, or a related field.
  
• At least 2 years of experience in data analysis or a related field.
  
• Strong quantitative and analytical skills, with proficiency in Excel and at least one statistical tool (e.g., Stata, R, SPSS).
  
• Excellent knowledge of and ability to work with SQL databases.
  
• Knowledge of statistical principals, especially relating to designing and running randomised control trials.
  
• Experience with data visualisation tools (e.g., Power BI, Tableau).
  
• Ability to summarise data insights and communicate findings to non-technical audiences.
  
• Experience in managing and working with large datasets.
  
• Strong attention to detail and accuracy.
  

Desirable

• Experience working in a social impact or nonprofit context.
  
• Familiarity with survey software (e.g. SurveyCTO) and CRMs (Microsoft Dynamics) as well as Azure.
  
• Familiarity with data governance, including privacy, compliance, and security requirements.
  
• Basic knowledge of data process mapping and workflow optimisation.
  

General Knowledge & Understanding and/or Skills & Abilities

Behaving & Learning

• Behaving trustworthily: being reliable, accepting, open, congruent (ie. integrity)
  

• Learning curiously, incl. learning how by doing differently
  

o Clear curiosity (asking questions, questioning assumptions, doing differently, trying things)

o Track record of learning

o Openness to & appetite for feedback

• Familiarity with and curiosity about
  

o Societal scale

o Systems doing-and-thinking

o Design thinking & iterative designing

o Driving to succeed

• Commitment to SmartStart’s purpose and social justice internationally
  

• Advantageous: experience in, or familiarity with, early learning, ECD, education, public health, etc
  

Relating & Adapting

• Building trusting relationships
  

• Playing role(s)-across-contexts adaptively
  

• Creating the conditions for and facilitating people’s thinking diversely and doing good work together
  

• Co-building & communicating coherence unendingly
  

• Reprioritising continually
  

Developing Self

• Acknowledging one’s own relative strengths (& weaknesses)
  

• Seeing & navigating rhetoric vs reality
  

• Navigating ambiguity
  

• Coping with stress caused by the above
  

Developing Systems Doing-and-Thinking

Seeing, synthesising, sense-making and influencing

• the big picture / story, incl. emergent phenomena
  

• the relations between wholes & parts
  

• patterns across space and over time
  

• feedback loops (circular causation)
  

• boundaries and working across them appropriately
  

Sophisticated problem-solving, incl. distinguishing complicated from complex problems & contexts

• scan & synthesise disparate sources of information
  

• if complicated: sense-analyse-respond
  

• if complex: probe-sense-respond