Knowledge Built from African Realities
REFA produces rigorous research by treating African contexts as sources of theory, method and institutional insight, and by bringing different forms of knowledge into genuine dialogue.
Context Is Not a Variable to Control Away
Many institutions arrive as finished forms, before the social, economic and relational conditions that make them work have been understood. REFA studies how people already organise economic and institutional life, then asks what stronger systems can be built from that knowledge.
This does not mean treating knowledge from elsewhere as inherently unsuitable, or romanticising local systems. It means testing ideas through the realities of the societies they are intended to serve, and sharing intellectual authority with the people who understand those realities from within.
Four Commitments Across the Research
Begin from Context
Frame questions from lived economic, social and institutional systems, without beginning from a deficit assumed in advance.
Share Intellectual Authority
Co-produce questions, interpretation and outputs with researchers, practitioners, policymakers and community knowledge holders.
Test Institutional Fit
Examine whether systems are legible, legitimate and workable for the people expected to use and sustain them.
Translate Knowledge into Use
Build credible routes from evidence into policy, curricula, institutional practice and community-led action.
Institutions Should Become Legible to People
REFA asks how institutions can work with the social and economic realities they encounter, rather than requiring people to become legible to systems designed elsewhere.
Six Connected Research Clusters
The clusters are broad, multidisciplinary homes for inquiry. Their boundaries overlap because institutional questions do not arrive neatly divided by discipline.
Education and Epistemic Agency
How curricula, pedagogy and knowledge systems shape reasoning, confidence and the capacity to think and act from one’s own epistemic ground.
Cluster Chair: Professor Adeola Bosede OgunrinEconomic Organisation and Macroeconomic Design
How African economies are organised across formal and informal life, and what those realities require of macroeconomic, fiscal and monetary design.
Cluster Chair: Dr Omowumi Omodunni IdowuEnvironmental and Resource Governance
How embedded tenure, stewardship and resource-use logics can inform environmental governance, land policy and climate adaptation.
Cluster Chair: Dr Oluwasola Emmanuel OmojuHealth, Wellbeing and Structural Equity
How institutional fit and structural inequity shape health and wellbeing, and how systems of care can be redesigned for relevance and equity.
Trust, Legitimacy and Institutional Performance
How institutions earn trust, build legitimacy and perform, including new context-sensitive ways to measure coherence and accountability.
Governance, Culture and Legislative Prototyping
How governance traditions, cultural systems and embedded social logics can inform workable policy, law and institutional prototypes.
Cluster Chair: Professor Fatima OsmanConnect With REFA
REFA welcomes relationships that make a clear contribution to knowledge, institutional learning or practical change.
Researchers and Knowledge Holders
Develop questions, methods and interpretations that are theoretically rigorous and grounded in lived systems.
Discuss a Research Relationship →Public and Institutional Partners
Connect evidence to live questions in policy, education, legislation and organisational design.
Propose an Institutional Collaboration →Community and Practice Partners
Shape inquiry around the knowledge, constraints and possibilities present in the systems people use every day.
Start a Practice Conversation →Funders and Programme Partners
Support research and translation routes with the time, relationships and resources required for meaningful work.
Discuss Supporting the Work →