Consultant for the Development of the Campaign Information Management System (CIMS)

Our Vision & Mission

We envision a world in which all people have access to high quality and enduring solutions to improve and maintain their health and well-being. MCD aspires to be a premier partner of choice and an internationally recognized leader, innovator, and trusted partner in applied, cross-national public health solutions. Our mission is to improve the health and well-being of people worldwide through enduring, high-quality, cost-effective, and universally accessible public health solutions.

About the Position

The Bioko Island Malaria Elimination Project (BIMEP) is a 22 year partnership between the Government of Equatorial Guinea, oil sector partners and MCD Global Health, working toward malaria elimination under the Vice President's Vision 2030 strategy. The Ministry of Health leads the effort through the National Malaria Control Program, and MCD Global Health serves as implementing partner and operational coordinator. The 2026 to 2030 phase extends program activities from Bioko Island to mainland Equatorial Guinea and Annobón Island.

The Campaign Information Management System (CIMS) is a proprietary MCD platform that holds the programmatic data for BIMEP field interventions, including indoor residual spraying (IRS), MILD distribution, larval source management and malaria indicator surveys. It is the data backbone of the spatial decision support system that plans and directs field interventions in Equatorial Guinea, combining geographic information with field data reported during each campaign so that managers can monitor coverage and redirect teams while activities are under way.

PALU carries out MCD's analytical work across MCD’s international program. Its processes include automated reports, data models built with dbt, and scheduled extraction of data from external sources such as DHIS2. These processes developed over several years on different servers and tools. With fewer systems now in use, MCD intends to consolidate them on a smaller, documented and less costly architecture built on GitLab for version control and continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), AWS for hosting, and possibly Databricks as a unified data warehouse.

MCD seeks a consultant to carry out this consolidation through three deliverable areas, and to provide maintenance and technical support for the systems as they are put in place. The consultant will work within the existing team under the technical direction of the Digital Health Tools and Systems Lead. The work should leave PALU and digital health staff able to operate, modify and extend these systems without outside help.

This consultancy is a two-month pilot running from November to December 2026, aligned with MCD's budget year. It tests the working arrangement and the fit between the consultant, the tools and the team. If the pilot goes well, MCD expects to extend the engagement in 2027 for further CIMS development and continued maintenance.

Key Responsibilities 

Databricks Assessment and Pilot

• Assess Databricks against PALU's current and expected data warehouse needs and against the requirements of active projects, including comparison with the PostgreSQL environment MCD already runs on AWS.

• Set up and configure a small data model in Databricks, using a representative subset of PALU data, to estimate compute, storage and licensing costs under realistic use.

• Configure connectors to the priority external data sources agreed with PALU, to test how a data warehouse would be populated and kept current.

• Prepare a cost benefit analysis for MCD PALU covering direct costs, staff time, skills required, and the risks of adopting and of not adopting the platform.

• Draft plans for future projects, addressing complex data interoperability and data governance and localization requirements, including where data must be stored and who controls access.

• Document all configuration, test results and findings.

GitLab CI/CD for PALU and the New CIMS

• Configure pipelines, pipeline schedules and related files to automate PALU processes, including automated reports, dbt model builds, data extraction from external sources, and other automations agreed with PALU.

• Configure a CIMS repository to handle CI/CD for the new CIMS codebase, including automated builds, version control conventions, release tagging and test stages.

• Assist with configuring application logging for CIMS and PALU processes.

• Address deployment dependencies with ODK Central versioning, so that CIMS releases and ODK Central upgrades can be tested and deployed together without disrupting field data collection.

• Define and configure pipeline notifications and reporting, so that failures reach the person responsible.

• Manage access control, including user roles, protected branches, and storage of credentials in GitLab CI/CD variables or an approved secrets manager.

AWS Alignment and Cost Optimization

• Review the current AWS account structure, services and monthly costs, and identify resources that are idle, oversized or duplicated.

• Explore cost saving opportunities, including reserved instances or savings plans, unifying the architecture, and moving to more appropriate technologies where they cost less to run.

• Configure GitLab runners on AWS if required by Deliverable Area 2.

• Modernize and streamline the deployment of MCD applications across PALU and IT, for example through containers and infrastructure as code, so that each application can be rebuilt from its repository.

Maintenance and Technical Support

• Review and provide written feedback on draft documentation for new systems, standards and processes prepared by the MCD team.

• Write the code required to configure the systems covered by this TOR, where this falls outside Deliverable Areas 1 to 3.

• Provide guidance and training to relevant team members, including a handover session for each completed deliverable area.

• Apply security patches and dependency updates, including GitLab runners and ODK Central in coordination with the CIMS team.

• Monitor pipelines, scheduled jobs and infrastructure, and fix failures.

• Confirm that backups run and test a restore at least once during the pilot.

• Review AWS and, if adopted, Databricks costs each month and flag unexpected changes.

• Keep documentation and runbooks current as systems change.

• Triage and resolve maintenance tickets in Jira. Pasted markdown

Additional Consultancy Expectations

The consultant will be expected to:

• Follow MCD security and data protection requirements, including working through MCD-issued accounts, using approved systems for credentials and data, protecting confidential information, and complying with MCD’s confidentiality and data ownership requirements.

• Track tasks and provide regular updates through Jira, meet weekly with the Digital Health Tools and Systems Lead, maintain appropriate technical documentation, and complete handover sessions so that MCD staff can maintain the systems independently.

• Work toward the pilot milestones: onboarding and work planning in the first week of November; Databricks pilot data model and cost estimates by November 20; key outputs for all three deliverable areas by December 18; and handover sessions and the end-of-pilot report by December 31.

• Deliver outputs on schedule and without major rework, ensure PALU automations operate as expected, identify and implement approved AWS savings, resolve maintenance requests within agreed response times, and maintain appropriate security standards throughout the engagement.

Qualifications and Experience

Required

• Degree in computer science, software engineering, information systems or a related field, or equivalent professional experience

• At least five years of experience in DevOps, cloud infrastructure or data engineering

• Hands on experience configuring GitLab CI/CD, including runners, pipeline schedules and protected variables

• Experience administering AWS environments, including identity and access management, EC2, RDS, S3, networking and cost management

• Strong SQL and PostgreSQL skills and working knowledge of Python

• Experience with dbt and with building data pipelines from APIs

• Experience applying security practice in cloud environments: access control, secrets management, backup and recovery

• Clear technical writing in English

Desirable

• Experience with Databricks or a comparable platform such as Snowflake or BigQuery, including cost modelling

• Experience with ODK Central, DHIS2 or other health information systems

• Experience with containers and infrastructure as code (for example Docker and Terraform)

• Previous work supporting health programs in Africa

• Working knowledge of Spanish

How to Apply

Interested consultants should submit a short technical proposal and a financial proposal. Firms that apply must name the individual who will carry out the work.

Technical Proposal (maximum five pages, excluding CV)

• Brief approach for each deliverable area

• Availability between 1 November and 31 December 2026, in days per week

• Programming languages, platforms and tools the consultant works with, and level of experience in each

• CV

• Two or three examples of comparable work, with contact details for references

Financial Proposal

• All inclusive hourly rate in US dollars

• Any other costs the consultant expects to charge. Cloud and software license costs in MCD accounts, including Databricks usage during the pilot, are paid directly by MCD and are not part of the consultant's fees.