Lessons learnt from ASToN (2019-2022)

• Be flexible as much as you can with your hiring scheme. After one year into the programme we realised an extra permanent staff was needed.

• Create time for all the team to be aligned on the programme independently of their involvement (part-time, full-time etc). In our case this meant bi-weekly meetings to share the status & next steps on the on-going activities. This is a positive result of COVID-19: the confinement and remoteness led us, in the beginning, to hold a daily conference call at a fixed time. This was transformed into 2 weekly meetings at fixed days and times which remained after the crisis.

• Regularly reflect on what’s working, roles, and the relationship. We used a regular rhythm of retrospective and reflection to check in on what was working and what wasn’t, and keep defining our roles in line with the needs.

• Create a pool of expertise from the start you can hire people from. The wider the skill-set covered by the pool, the better.

• Context matters. Having people who understood the local, national, African or thematic context was vital.

• Evolve meetings and working rhythms in line with need. Over the course of the project, all-expert meetings felt overly heavy and we moved to much more lean structures only pulling in the relevant experts when needed.