ASToN Phase 3: a unique project for city-led experimentation in Africa

The nine local authorities profiled in this report have, since 2019, been engaging with each other as part of the ASToN Network, which was designed to be run in three Phases. Phase 1, Explore, was about setting the baseline and mapping the landscape. The second phase, Engage, was about moving from theory to practice and begin building relationships with people from outside the local authority, in each sector that’s affected by or involved in the problem and the potential solution for tackling it.

Phase 3, on the other hand, was designed for local authorities to learn about lean experimentation and use this approach to test parts of their Local Action Plan. The Local Action Plan is the key output of the ASToN project, being a document that describes the proposed solutions the local authority has identified during the course of the network and a roadmap for their implementation. The hope was that, during the experimentation phase, local authorities would be able to validate or invalidate certain assumptions they had about the successful rollout of these solutions so that they could feed this learning back into their Local Action Plan and iterate.

During Phase 3, the local authorities were given grant funding of up to €50k to conduct their activities. They were also supported by a dedicated coach, who they met with regularly, first to construct the experiments, and then to reflect on ongoing learnings.
Local authorities ranged from having never engaged with concepts such as experimentation or testing assumptions to having already taken an experimental approach to digital projects. Some teams struggled to formulate assumptions or belief statements about their solution with their coaches, and there was often a sense that either something was apparently fully known to the city – and so didn’t need to be tested – or that a crucial aspect of the solution only needed to be decided and verified further down the line.

Overall, the experience of each local authority and how they conducted their experiments was unique, and reflected the varied size, capacity, and mandate of both the local authorities and their staff leading the project through the Local Action Groups. For more information on some of these contextual differences, please consult the ASToN Baseline Study.

Each local authority created a set of lean experiments for them to learn quickly and cheaply, while working towards a more functional solution. The local authorities did this in different ways depending on their circumstances: for example, some developed a “minimum viable product” to engage with users, whereas others built a pilot of their intended solution. Alternatively, some experiments were focused more on understanding the organisational and legal parameters for future implementation.

Alongside the diversity of experiments designed during this period, Phase 3 of the ASToN project also high- lighted other differences faced by local administrations, for example, in procurement practices, staff capacity, or external factors that either helped or hindered the ability for the local authority to conduct lean experimentation.

The purpose of this Catalogue is to dig deeper into these examples, to see what each local authority learned in what was for them a short time, and provide inspiration for others who may be thinking about conducting experiments themselves.