Consultancy on Financing for Development

Client of United Nation careers

Background ESCWA supports Arab countries in strengthening national and regional financing systems to accelerate progress toward the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development. Through an integrated approach that combines policy dialogue, analytical research, capacity-building, and digital innovation, ESCWA assists member States in mobilizing and managing financing across key sources, including domestic public resources, private investment, international development cooperation, trade and investment flows, and sustainable debt management. This work is aligned with global commitments, including the Seville Commitment, which underscores the importance of strengthening accountability and governance in financing development, as well as the mandates to address financing leakages as a key enabler of financing sustainable development. (paragraphs 29 (a) & (c), 28 (e), and 33 (a)). Central to this work is the conduct of detailed diagnostics of the financing for development landscape, analysing the various sources of financing available to address five major financing rifts that continue to impede sustainable development in the Arab region: financing insolvencies, financing inequalities, fiscal space constraints, funding shortfalls, and debt-financing overhangs. In response, ESCWA advances regional cooperation on domestic resource mobilization, integrated financing solutions, diversifying sources of revenues and addressing leakages related to illicit financial flows and investment distortions. These efforts are complemented by policy recommendations and practical tools to support governments in improving revenue mobilization and financing strategies. In parallel, ESCWA has developed a forward-looking digital financing ecosystem composed of analytical and AI-powered tools that enable governments assess financing gaps, improve spending efficiency, optimize public spending, address illicit financial flows, strengthen multiple aspects of their financing strategies, enhance policy targeting, accelerate progress towards the SDGs, and design integrated financing strategies aligned with national development priorities. This ecosystem has received recognition at multiple institutional levels and has been endorsed under the Seville Platform of Action and recognized by DESA as a scalable, real-life application that can be adapted and replicated across countries and regions. Within this context, ESCWA seeks a consultant to provide support in the implementation of various FfD activities as detailed below.

Duties and Responsibilities

1. Map productive linkages across pilot country/countries production base and financing structure to identify sectoral interdependencies, financing bottlenecks, and opportunities for higher-value economic transformation.
2. Estimate latent financing-space linkages by combining prospective structural configurations, visualization tools, and empirical signals of capability-space adjacency to identify feasible pathways for economic diversification and financing mobilization for blended finance while addressing resource leakages.
3. Construct and align a high-dimensional proximity matrix across the production universe, integrating relevant product, sectoral, industrial, and financing classification systems to enable comparable mapping of productive and financing linkages, identify tax- and trade-based leakage channels, and detect unrealized or suboptimally realized productive potential.
4. Normalize and validate the matrix to ensure connectivity, consistency, and suitability for modelling and network diagnostics.
5. Develop a structural scoring framework to assess relative feasibility, productive accessibility, and strategic positioning of diversified commodity-linked financing opportunities, while identifying products and sectors exposed to illicit financial flow risks.
6. Design and implement a Python-based analytical framework to query, harmonize, and transform relevant investment datasets into a standardized panel, supporting downstream empirical analysis and the identification of potential anomalies in investment patterns.
7. Apply data-driven analytical methods to identify patterns, groupings and relationships across sectors and products based on selected structural and operational characteristics.
8. Integrate Product-level production indicators to assess economic trends, identify priority areas, and highlight sector-focused policy support.
9. Develop and apply econometric models to assess structural feasibility, between proximate products across inter-connected products and sectors. This includes:
   • Preparing panel dataset of products competitiveness and production indicators.
   • Integrating structural linkage and proximity matrices into the modelling framework.
   • Estimating econometric models to analyse the evolution of production and structural upgrading patterns.
   • Assessing productive feasibility and upgrading opportunities, across interconnected sectors and products.
10. Generate and assess alternative upgrading pathways based on econometric modelling results.
11. Other related tasks related to the deliverables below as requested by the Hiring Manager.