The REFA Project
The REFA Project is the translation arm of the REFA Hub, the mechanism through which research about how communities actually organise their lives is converted into institutional frameworks, policy tools, and governance systems that genuinely fit the contexts they are meant to serve.
Three Pillars, One Agenda
Knowing, Aligning, and Doing
The Network
An interdisciplinary community of researchers and practitioners producing discovery-led research grounded in how communities actually organise, govern, and coordinate their lives.
Meet the Fellows →The Charter
An institutional commitment framework that brings universities, policy institutes, government bodies, funders, and civil society into formal alignment with the agenda.
Read the Charter →The Project
The operational arm that takes research findings and translates them into tools, pilots, prototypes, and implementation partnerships that move knowledge into practice.
Research that is not translated into practice cannot change how institutions work, and that translation is what the REFA Project exists to do: to ensure that knowledge about how African communities actually organise their lives moves from understanding into the design of systems that genuinely serve them.
The Translation Arm of the REFA Hub
The REFA Hub generates research through the Network and builds institutional partnerships through the Charter, and the Project is where that work touches ground: the mechanism through which findings about institutional coherence are converted into tools, frameworks, and prototypes that communities, governments, and organisations can actually use.
We work with communities to understand how they already organise their lives, with policymakers to design systems that fit those realities, and with institutions to build frameworks that are coherent with the societies they serve, drawing on the best available knowledge from any source while always beginning from context, from what communities already know, already do, and already need.
Our Operating Principle
We believe institutions work when they reflect the logics of the communities they serve, and our commitment is to ensure that external frameworks are brought into genuine dialogue with the knowledge systems and practices that communities already use, rather than applied as templates without serious engagement with context. This is what we mean by institutional coherence, and it guides everything the REFA Project does.
What the Project Does
The Project works across the full cycle from research to implementation, always in partnership with the communities and institutions whose lives and work the research concerns. Our activities span four interconnected domains.
Institutional Prototypes
Building and testing governance models, policy tools, and coordination frameworks in real contexts.
Policy Translation
Partnering with ministries and agencies to design and implement coherence-grounded policy.
Community Co-Design
Working directly with communities to co-create interventions grounded in local knowledge.
Diagnostics and Evaluation
Assessing whether institutions and interventions are genuinely aligned with the communities they serve.
Curriculum Development
Designing educational frameworks that embed institutional coherence from the outset.
Procurement Review
Reviewing bids and programmes to ensure coherence is a genuine requirement, not just a box to tick.
Charter Implementation
Serving as the operational partner for Charter signatories moving from commitment to practice.
Capacity Building
Training practitioners to apply coherence-grounded approaches in their own institutional contexts.
Youth Ambassadors Programme
The systems we are building must make sense to the people who will live with them, and that means bringing young people into the work now, not as recipients of finished frameworks but as participants in how those frameworks are developed. The Youth Ambassadors Programme connects young people across Africa and the diaspora with REFA’s research and translation activities, creating pathways for engagement, learning, and contribution.
Become a REFA Ambassador
We are building a network of youth ambassadors who serve as bridges between the REFA Hub and communities, campuses, and professional spaces across the continent. Ambassadors engage with research, contribute to community advocacy, and help ensure that the next generation of institutional thinking is shaped by those who will inherit its outcomes.
Learn More →Support the Work
The REFA Project is building the infrastructure for translating research about how African communities actually organise their lives into institutional frameworks that genuinely fit, and this work requires resources. We are actively seeking partners, funders, and supporters who share this commitment.
Direct funding, grants, or sponsorship to resource research translation, community engagement, and institutional prototyping.
Hosting events, providing research infrastructure, offering technical expertise, or making institutional networks available.
Joint funding applications, co-produced research, shared evaluation frameworks, and long term institutional collaboration.
Ready to Support?
We are currently establishing the REFA Project as a formally registered entity in Nigeria. If you would like to discuss how to support this work, whether through funding, partnership, or in-kind contribution, we would welcome the conversation.
Where This Leads
REFA aims to enable a future where institutions across Africa are coherent, context-sensitive, and effective by design, drawing on the best knowledge from any source while remaining grounded in the realities of the communities they serve, to the point where the Hub itself is no longer needed because its principles are fully embedded in how institutions are built.
That is the long term trajectory, and the REFA Project is how we move toward it: through partnerships that produce real outcomes, prototypes that test ideas in practice, and sustained engagement with the communities and institutions whose work this research is ultimately about.
Let Us Work Together
Whether you are a government ministry, a funder, a community organisation, or a researcher who believes knowledge should move beyond publication, we would welcome the conversation about how we might work together.