What the REFA Hub Is
The REFA Hub is a research and translation platform that investigates how African societies actually organise economic, social and institutional life, and works to translate that understanding into modern institutional architectures that are coherent, operational and grounded in lived realities and local knowledge systems.
The Hub connects three parts: the Network, where discovery happens through multidisciplinary scholarship; the Charter, which sets out the principles that guide how REFA researches, collaborates and translates knowledge into use; and the REFA Project, where findings move into institutional pilots, policy design and community-engaged practice.
Research, Translation, Institutional Design
Discover
Cross-disciplinary inquiry into how societies organise economic life, govern themselves and build trust, producing theory and evidence grounded in embedded practice.
Connect
A distributed research fellowship spanning disciplines, institutions and geographies, linking scholars, policymakers, practitioners and community knowledge holders.
Translate
Every stream of inquiry has a pathway to implementation, moving research into policy, curricula, institutional practice and community-led action.
Build
Co-producing institutional alternatives with the systems and societies they are intended to serve, and designing for coherence and practical use.
Leadership
Dr Ruth Badru
University of Bristol, UK
Dr Omowumi Omodunni Idowu
Associate Professor, Ekiti State University
Co-Director, REFA Project
Dr Oluwasola Emmanuel Omoju
Senior Research Fellow, NILDS; UNDP Consultant
Institutional Host: Ekiti State University, Nigeria
A Distributed Research Fellowship
The Network brings together scholars, educators, policymakers and community practitioners working across disciplines, institutions and geographies. Fellows conduct discovery-led research grounded in lived systems, build formal theory from embedded practice and engage directly with policy, education and governance actors.
Fellowship means intellectual seriousness, methodological pluralism and a commitment to treating African contexts as sources of theory and institutional insight.
Meet the Network Fellows →Research Focus Areas
The Network is organised around 6 connected, multidisciplinary research clusters. Their questions, current focus and interim chairs sit within REFA’s wider epistemic approach.
From Research to Practice
The REFA Project is the operational arm of the Hub, where research moves into institutional pilots, policy design and community-engaged work. Every inquiry is designed with a translation pathway from the start, so findings can be tested, refined and used in real institutional practice.
Institutional Commitment to Building Differently
The REFA Charter is a formal commitment framework through which universities, ministries, agencies, funders and other institutional actors can engage substantively with the work of redesigning institutional practice, questioning what counts as evidence, success and a legitimate starting point for policy, education and governance.
The Charter asks institutions to co-produce alternatives grounded in the realities of the societies they serve, and to make coherence the first criterion for institutional design.