The REFA Charter
The REFA Charter is a commitment framework for institutions that recognise effective institutional design must engage seriously with the knowledge systems and lived realities of the communities it is meant to serve. By signing, your institution joins a coalition committed to building systems that fit the societies they serve, drawing on the best knowledge available from any source while refusing to bypass the contexts where that knowledge must work.
A Statement of Shared Values
Communities across Africa have always organised their own lives: economic coordination, trust, governance, dispute resolution, resource allocation. These systems carry deep institutional intelligence, built over generations and continuously adapted to the conditions in which people actually live. At the same time, knowledge from elsewhere, from research, from other contexts, from global scholarship, offers tools and insights that can support effective institutional design when brought into genuine dialogue with local realities.
Our commitment is that external frameworks do not become the default starting point, and when employed are applied with serious engagement with the knowledge systems and practices that communities already use.
The REFA Charter is a way for your institution to say, publicly and formally, that it is committed to a different approach: one that begins from context, engages seriously with what communities already know and do, and brings external knowledge into dialogue with those realities rather than imposing it as a template. The Charter is not a legal contract and carries no financial obligation. It records your institution’s commitment to designing systems that genuinely fit, and to working substantively on what that requires in practice.
Signing the Charter opens pathways for collaboration, advisory engagement, and co-produced research with the REFA Network. It positions your institution within a coalition committed to building institutions that work because they are coherent with the societies they serve.
Core Principle: Institutional Coherence
Institutional coherence means designing systems that are aligned with how communities actually organise, govern, and coordinate their lives. It does not mean rejecting external knowledge. It means refusing to bypass local knowledge systems in favour of imported frameworks, and instead bringing together the best available knowledge from any source in genuine dialogue with the contexts where institutions must function. When institutions reflect the logics of the communities they serve, when they fit, they work.
What Signatories Commit To
The Charter sets out five areas of commitment. These are principles, not prescriptions. Every institution engages with them differently, in ways that make sense within its own context and capacity.
Contextual Grounding
Building institutional frameworks that begin from how communities actually coordinate, govern, and allocate resources. Engaging seriously with indigenous knowledge, lived practice, and embedded systems of organisation, and ensuring that the models your institution develops, funds, or teaches are designed in genuine dialogue with the contexts they are meant to serve.
Discovery-Led Research
Supporting inquiry that begins from how people actually organise economic life, build trust, enforce agreements, and govern themselves. Recognising informal and indigenous systems as analytically sophisticated knowledge worthy of serious study, and building research agendas that treat local contexts as sources of insight rather than problems to be solved with external frameworks.
Translation and Implementation
Moving knowledge into practice. Supporting the translation of research findings into policy tools, governance frameworks, educational models, and institutional prototypes that are coherent with the contexts they serve, integrating the best available knowledge from all sources in ways that fit local realities.
Collaboration Through the REFA Hub
Engaging with the Hub as a long term partner: contributing to interdisciplinary work, sharing findings openly, and participating in the co-production of knowledge across disciplines, geographies, and institutional boundaries.
Resource Alignment
Within your institutional capacity, supporting the resourcing of REFA-affiliated work, whether through joint funding applications, in-kind contributions like hosting events or providing research infrastructure, or access to institutional networks and expertise. There is no fixed financial requirement.
What Signing Looks Like for Your Institution
The Charter is designed for different types of institutions to engage in ways that are meaningful within their own work. Here is what that looks like in practice.
Universities and Research Centres
Embedding principles of contextual grounding into research agendas and curricula. Hosting or co-hosting research and translation activities. Supporting fellows and early career researchers. Contributing to interdisciplinary collaboration that takes local knowledge systems seriously.
Policy Research Institutes
Aligning policy analysis with the principle that institutional design should engage with lived realities. Contributing to the translation of findings into policy tools and governance frameworks. Co-producing evidence with communities rather than only about them.
Government Bodies and Ministries
Piloting institutionally coherent policy prototypes. Providing operational contexts for testing new frameworks. Engaging with findings that inform how policy design can better serve the communities it is meant to reach.
Foundations and Funders
Reviewing funding criteria to ensure they support institutions designed in dialogue with the contexts they serve. Recognising that effective institutional design requires serious engagement with local knowledge, not just technical capacity building. Supporting long-term resourcing of REFA-affiliated work.
Civil Society Organisations
Facilitating community engagement across REFA’s work. Ensuring that community knowledge and lived experience inform institutional design processes. Connecting the knowledge agenda with the communities whose lives and systems provide its foundation.
Professional and Diaspora Networks
Connecting REFA with expertise, institutional access, and resources across geographies. Supporting the internationalisation of the agenda while keeping it grounded in African realities and open to knowledge from all sources.
What Signing Opens
The Charter is not a passive endorsement. It creates pathways for substantive engagement with the REFA Network and positions your institution within a coalition working toward coherent institutional design.
Advisory and Translational Work
Signatories can engage REFA for advisory work on curriculum design, policy prototyping, governance reform, and institutional diagnostics grounded in the coherence framework.
Collaborative Research
Signatories gain priority access to REFA Network fellows and can propose joint research projects, co-authored publications, and collaborative grant applications.
Network Events and Convenings
Signatories are invited to REFA workshops, research convenings, and policy dialogues where findings are shared and translational pathways are developed.
Visibility and Coalition Building
Signatories are listed publicly on the REFA Hub, signalling their commitment to this agenda and building visibility within a growing coalition of aligned institutions.
Core Streams
REFA’s work, spanning research, translation, and implementation, is organised around six core streams. Signatories whose work intersects with any of these streams can coordinate with the REFA Network and contribute to the shared agenda.
Nature of Commitment
The Charter is a formal declaration of alignment, not a contract. It creates no legal obligations and requires no financial contribution.
5 year initial term with automatic 3 year renewals. Any signatory may withdraw with 6 months written notice.
Multi-decade. This is a long term commitment to building institutions that fit, measured by coherence rather than by external benchmarks alone.
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.
The Process
Express Interest
Contact REFA to indicate your institution would like to explore signing the Charter.
Alignment Discussion
We discuss what the Charter means in your specific institutional context and how you would engage.
Formal Signature
Your institution signs the full Charter document, including all articles, and joins the network.
The Charter engagement document is available in three languages.
Institutions Aligned
The following institutions have signed the REFA Charter and joined the coalition committed to institutional coherence.
Additional signatories will be announced as they join the coalition.
Ready to Join?
If you would like to discuss what alignment looks like for your institution, or if you are ready to begin the process, we would welcome the conversation.