Junior Data Associate, Council on Smallholder Agricultural Finance

Council on Smallholder Agricultural Finance (CSAF) is a global member network of lending practitioners working to promote and expand responsible finance for agricultural small- and medium-enterprises (SMEs), including both producer organizations and private enterprises. Our members and field building partners are pioneering financial institutions and ecosystem actors that come together to share learning and promote the growth of a thriving market that generates long-term economic, social, and environmental impact by meeting the financing needs of inclusive agricultural SMEs globally. CSAF promotes shared learning, industry standards, and stronger social and environmental outcomes through data, collaboration, and evidence-based insights.

The Junior Data Associate will support the collection, validation, analysis, and publication of CSAF members’ lending data, helping ensure CSAF’s data analysis, and public dashboards are accurate, well-documented, and useful to CSAF members and practitioners, partners, and other stakeholders. This role will report to the CSAF Data & Learning Manager and provide additional support to the CSAF Director.

Key Responsibilities

[A] Data collection, review & analysis

• Collect and consolidate member-submitted annual data based on pre-established templates and norms.
• Validate data submissions for completeness, consistency and accuracy.
• Maintain clean, analysis-ready master datasets with clear versioning and documentation.
• Clean and standardize fields for analysis (edates, geographies, categories, currency/units where relevant)
• Support drafting the analysis outputs to support CSAF publications, presentations, and learning products
• Assist in preparing analysis for CSAF publications, presentations, and learning materials.
• Support updates to the internal data analysis and CSAF Open Data Portal.
• Provide quality assurance on  dashboard outputs by reconciling aggregates vs source tables before publishing.
• Act as a thought partner on new insight generation, potential analysis, and the presentation of data and insights to external stakeholders.

[B] Member coordination & planning

• Work with CSAF members to resolve data questions and improve submission quality.
• Maintain submission guidance, templates, and definitions to streamline reporting.
• Keep the work plan and activity progress consistently updated. 
• Coordinate informational technical sessions with CSAF members, partners, and external experts.
• Support with logistics planning or the annual in-person Convening in Europe. 

Ideal candidates will have 1-3 years of experience in data analysis, paired with an appetite to develop planning and project management skills, an intellectual curiosity and commitment to learning, and a desire to create positive social impact.

Required

• Bachelor degree or equivalent with 1–3 years of experience in data analysis, research, or data operations
• Demonstrated Excel skills and comfort working with real-world lending data
• Experience with data cleaning and review
• High attention to detail and strong quality assurance habits
• Strong English language proficiency; working knowledge of Spanish or French is a plus
• Ability to communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Willingness and availability to travel to Europe minimum 1 week per year
• Enthusiasm for learning.

Preferred (but not required)

• Exposure to development finance, impact investing, agricultural finance, or banking
• Familiarity with dashboards (Power BI, Tableau)
• Interest in transparency, responsible data sharing, and sector learning

The consultant would begin with a 1-year contract for 224 days with the potential to be renewed upon excellent performance.

This remote role is open to candidates working across the Americas, Europe, or Africa.

If you believe you can clearly demonstrate your abilities to meet the relevant criteria for the role, eligible candidates should submit a CV, cover letter, and desired daily rate.