WBG Pioneer - SPARC for Conflict-Affected and Reconstruction Contexts Intern

WBG Pioneers, the World Bank Group's Internship Program, offers undergraduate and postgraduate students a high impact learning experience at the heart of global development. Participants gain hands on experience in a diverse and dynamic environment, contribute fresh perspectives and innovative ideas, and connect with international professionals working to end poverty on a livable planet.

Background/Organizational Context

The Smart Parcel Atlas for Resilient Cities (SPARC) is a World Bank Group geospatial intelligence initiative that helps task teams and city governments generate and apply parcel-level spatial evidence for urban planning, infrastructure prioritization, land management, disaster risk management, and investment decisions. SPARC combines satellite imagery, global datasets, GeoAI methods, and administrative information to produce decision-ready layers on buildings, parcels, land use, infrastructure access, hazard exposure, population dynamics, and urban growth. The internship will support the thematic expansion of SPARC to conflict-affected and reconstruction contexts (e.g., South Sudan, Sudan, Ukraine), with a focus on how parcel- and neighborhood-level geospatial intelligence can inform remote monitoring, damage and change detection, population and displacement dynamics, service disruption analysis, and operational prioritization for recovery and resilience investments.

Duties and Responsibilities

• Review SPARC materials, reconstruction, and forced displacement use cases, and good practice on remote monitoring, damage detection, displacement tracking, and urban recovery analytics.
• Map relevant conflict-specific (including forced displacement) data sources and methods, including satellite imagery, building footprints, road networks, land cover, nighttime lights, population proxies, hazard exposure layers, and administrative datasets.
• Support definition of SPARC use cases for conflict and post-conflict settings, including reconstruction prioritization, service disruption screening, and remote supervision of recovery investments.
• Contribute to analytical frameworks, prototype analytics, mock-ups, and concise operational materials for selected contexts, subject to data availability and team priorities.
• Prepare notes, briefs, slide inputs, and documentation on data quality, uncertainty, limitations, validation needs, ethical considerations, and appropriate use in sensitive FCV contexts.