Independent government data analytics consultant

Government analytics your auditors can trace — and your team can run.

I help development banks, donor agencies, and public institutions turn messy administrative, fiscal, territorial, education, and electoral data into reproducible analysis, dashboards, and models they can defend, hand over, and re-run.

Trusted on programs for World Bank · GIZ · EU Delegation · national governments

Engaged by
World BankGIZEU Delegation National Ministries & GovernmentsSKAT
17+ yrs
In public policy, territorial analytics, and government data
250,000+
Administrative files integrated into analytical datasets
1,500+
Public institutions covered in data-collection frameworks
4,000+
Public institutions processed across several national methodologies
Sound familiar?

The work that outlives the consultant.

The last consultant left a spreadsheet nobody can re-run — and the one person who understood it is no longer on the contract.

A headline number is in the report, but when the auditor asks how it was produced, no one can trace it back to the data.

A forecast was read as a promise, the promise didn't hold, and now the method itself is under question.

Each of these is a reproducibility problem before it's a data problem. The practice below is built to make them not happen.

When to hire me

The problems this practice is built for.

A few of the situations where a senior, independent data hand earns its keep:

  • You need to turn scattered administrative data into a defensible analytical dataset.
  • A donor-funded program needs indicators, baselines, monitoring logic, or evaluation evidence.
  • A reform team needs territorial, fiscal, education, or institutional modelling.
  • A dashboard or report already exists, but nobody can reproduce the numbers.
  • You need a senior data person who can work with policy teams, not only technical teams.
What I do

A focused practice, not a generalist shop.

Six things, done to the standard the institutions funding the work expect: documented, defensible, and built to be inherited by the next team.

Analytics

Government data analytics

Turning administrative, statistical, and register data into a clean, documented analytical dataset a decision can rest on — with the lineage and assumptions written down for whoever audits it later.

M&E

Monitoring and evaluation analytics

Indicators, baselines, monitoring logic, and evaluation evidence for donor-funded programs — to reporting standards, with data lineage documented for the auditors who come after.

Territorial

Territorial and administrative reform modelling

National administrative geographies, census, and accessibility data joined on consistent boundaries — to show where interventions land, who they reach, and what amalgamation or reform would mean on the ground.

Public finance

Public finance and local government data analysis

Fiscal and budget data across hundreds of local authorities, standardized and benchmarked — so revenue, spending, and capacity can be compared on a like-for-like basis.

Engineering

R/Shiny dashboards and reproducible reporting systems

Reproducible data pipelines in R, Quarto reports, and Shiny dashboards your team can re-run long after the engagement ends. No orphaned spreadsheets; a full, documented handover.

Elections

Electoral analysis and public data pipelines

Statistical and electoral modelling — Monte Carlo simulation, seat allocation, benchmarking — delivered with the uncertainty quantified, never hidden, on pipelines that ingest public data reproducibly.

AI-assisted engineering, human-checked evidence

I use AI to speed up profiling, cleaning, documentation, and code review. Final outputs remain traceable to source data, version-controlled code, and human judgment. Sensitive client data is not handed to external AI tools; the domain knowledge decides what to trust, and every number stays reproducible.

Selected work

What delivery looks like.

A representative sample of engagements. Clients and figures are generalized under confidentiality; the shape of the work is real.

If any of these sound like the problem on your desk, the shape of the fix is below.

Donor-funded governance program[ i ]

Replacing a manual reporting cycle with a reproducible pipeline

The problem

A reform program depended on a monthly reporting cycle assembled by hand from scattered administrative sources — slow, error-prone, and impossible to audit or reproduce.

The approach

Rebuilt as a documented R pipeline with a single source taxonomy and versioned outputs, then trained the in-house team to own and extend it.

Result
≈ 1 h  (was 5 days)

A monthly cycle that once meant five days of manual assembly now completes in about an hour — and the client's own team owns it.

Public electoral analysis[ ii ]

An electoral forecast built to show what it doesn't know

The problem

Headline polls were being read as certainties. The need was a defensible probabilistic view that survived methodological scrutiny.

The approach

A Monte Carlo model with house-effect corrections and D'Hondt seat allocation, reporting credible intervals — and publishing the misses alongside the hits.

Result
90% credible intervals · misses published

Forecasts read with honest uncertainty, not false precision — credible intervals readers actually trusted, with every miss published in full.

Administrative-territorial reform model[ iii ]

Territorial benchmarking for an administrative-reform question

The problem

A reform debate needed to know how localities compared, and what amalgamation would mean in practice, across thousands of administrative units.

The approach

A road-distance and accessibility analysis joining administrative, demographic, and spatial data into a single benchmarking layer decision-makers could query.

Result
n ≈ 4,000+ units · one queryable layer

Thousands of administrative units benchmarked on one queryable layer — a policy debate mapped onto the ground.

Recognise the pattern in your own program? Tell me the decision you need to defend
How I work

Built for the people who audit it.

The same four steps on every engagement — so what you receive is a working system, not a slide deck and a goodbye.

Step i

Understand

Start from the decision you're trying to make and work back to the data. If it won't support the claim, I say so early.

Step ii

Profile & standardize

Explore and clean the sources — administrative registries, statistical and tax records, electoral formats — and agree a standardization plan before any modelling.

Step iii

Analyze & model

Reproducible R workflows with uncertainty quantified. Every output traces back to documented, version-controlled code.

Step iv

Hand over

Your team inherits the pipeline, the documentation, and the training to run it — fully self-sufficient, with no dependence on me to keep it going.

Have a decision that needs this kind of evidence? Tell me the decision you need to defend

About

A senior, independent hand on government data from the first scoping call — seventeen years across urban and regional planning, public policy, and data science, first as a planner and analyst, then founding a territorial-analytics practice, now independent.

My work spans public finance, education, territorial reform, elections, public administration, and M&E. I work almost entirely in R — documented pipelines, version control, Shiny, Quarto, GIS — with a bias toward reproducibility: outputs a client's team can re-run without me. I know the administrative data systems, including where they're inconsistent and how they break, which is usually where the real work is, and I'm as comfortable with a policy team as with a technical one.

I publish openly through my data-journalism newsletter, Din date adunate, because the fastest way to show how I reason is to do it in public.

Based in
Bucharest, Romania
Works in EN & RO · remote across the EU
Education
MA Public Policy & Administration, Bucharest · MA Town & Regional Planning, Sheffield · BA Urban Planning, “Ion Mincu”
Engagement
Independent (PFA) · short-term consultancy, framework contracts, advisory
Stack
R · tidyverse · data.table · DuckDB · SQL · PostgreSQL / PostGIS · Arrow / Parquet · Quarto · R Markdown · Shiny · sf · QGIS · GDAL · cron · renv · Docker · Git · AI-assisted tooling
Let's work together

Tell me the decision you need to defend.

Send me the decision, the deadline, the data sources, and the institutional context. I'll tell you where I can help — and what the data can, and can't, support.

contact@alexghita.eu