As we reflect on the past year, it’s clear that 2023-2024 has been a transformative period for Open Cities Lab (OCL). This year marked a significant shift from our start-up strategy to an expansive growth phase, and we've begun implementing our scale out strategy with encouraging results.

A Watershed Moment

The past year was a watershed moment for us. We made significant strides in deepening our mission, refining our approach, and innovating more efficiently. One of the most notable strategic shifts was streamlining our projects under unified product umbrellas (a process still very much in process). This change allows us to consolidate assets, approaches, and learnings under one product, providing the space to think deeper about how we move the needle, improve our processes, and map our impact.

Empowering Citizens and Improving Civic Engagement

Our commitment to empowering citizens and improving civic engagement saw us expand the MyCandidate platform, enhancing citizens' access to electoral candidate information in Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe. This initiative has informed the creation of a white-label toolkit for MyCandidate, which is part of our scaling strategy to hand over product development to local organisations. Building on our previous iterations, we launched a successful MyCandidate South Africa ahead of the May 2024 elections.  

Additionally, The Answers Platform (TAP) has been a game-changer. In collaboration with Asivikelane, we sent bulk WhatsApp messages to over 5000 informal settlement residents, engaging them in conversations about the state of basic services accessible to them. The system is now fully automated, allowing Asivikelane to independently use the tool with occasional technical and data support from OCL.

Improving Trust and Accountability

In 2023, we made critical progress in improving data access and availability in Africa through the Africa Data Hub platform. Key projects included the collection of healthcare data in Nigeria in collaboration with Orodata Science, and the collation of femicide cases in Kenya, with our partners Odipo Dev. We also ran several key training and fellowship programs to boost data literacy among African journalists. Our work under the Google News Initiative focused on streamlining the data pipeline, providing gender-sensitive data to newsrooms, and upskilling journalists in using gendered data appropriately in their storytelling.

Resource-intensive work on Dexter 2.0, made it possible for us to deploy a new, more robust version in May 2024 and hand the reigns to MMA to carry forward. Dexter is a media monitoring tool which analyses news media content, primarily in the southern African digital media space, by extracting and analysing entries such as people, places, and companies from articles. We have supported our partner, Media Monitoring Africa, in using Dexter to train new media monitors and created interactive dashboards to publicly display South Africa’s upcoming election data. Dexter helps MMA understand media coverage patterns, focusing on representation, diversity, and power dynamics in media reporting. 

We also capacitated Alt Advisory, a collective of public interest lawyers and researchers, to own their own data, create their own visualisations, and build their own data stories for their Data Protection Africa (DPA) website.

Building Government Capacity

Our Urban Resilience Programme is one of our 2023-2024 highlights. We won a bid with the UK Foreign, Commonwealth, & Development Office (FCDO) for a three-year, £1 million project to support the institutionalisation of a data-driven culture in South African cities. Despite its infancy, the project made significant progress in its first year, including initiating six use cases and implementing data strategy interventions in two South African cities.

Over the past seven years, under the South African Cities Open Data Almanac (SCODA) umbrella program, we partnered with the South African Cities Network (SACN) to develop city-centric data portals, producing various civic-tech tools, data stories, and dashboards across multiple cities. In June 2023, we successfully transferred ownership of the portal and related work to SACN, aligning with our broader goal of empowering partners to continue implementing critical work independently.

Expanding Our Reach

This past year, we invested significantly more resources into strategic fundraising, advocacy, and communications. We attended and presented at key conferences and symposia such as DataFest Africa 2023, MozFest, and the African Investigative Journalism Conference. Additionally, we secured new grants from diverse funders, including the FCDO, the Constitutionalism Fund, and Mozilla.

Moving Forward

While there is much more work to be done, we are gaining momentum and are excited for the challenges and opportunities that lie before us. Our focus on products allows us to meet multiple delivery goals across different contexts as we work towards building systems for change.

We invite you to read our full Annual Report to see all the details of the past year and a high-level look at the work we’ve been doing and how our partners and our work are making a difference in the lives of city residents across Africa. We are grateful for the support of our partners, funders, and beneficiaries. We look forward to continuing this journey together.

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