Why REFA, and Why Now

I always like to start with this story that I first read about 11 years ago in Chinua Achebe’s Education of a British Protected Child, where he shares his adaptation of a very short Hausa tale from Nigeria. In the story, a Snake was riding his horse, curled up in the saddle, as was his fashion. As he passed the Toad, who was walking along the road, the Toad stopped him and said: excuse me, sir, but that is not how to ride a horse. The Snake asked if the Toad could show him how it is done, and the Toad said, with pleasure and so the Snake slid out of the saddle, down the side of the horse to the ground, and the Toad jumped up, eager to display its expertise, mounted and sat bolt upright, and galloped most elegantly up and down the road – that is how to ride a horse, he said. The Snake watched all of this, said very good, very good indeed, and then told the Toad to please descend. The Toad jumped down, the Snake slid back up into the saddle, coiled himself up exactly as before, and then, lowering his head and looking down at the Toad on the roadside, he said: to know is very good, but to have is better. What good can superb horsemanship do a man without a horse? And he rode away.

I read that story and it has stayed with me ever since, I have several interpretations of this story but what it most reminds of is about culture, about cultural capital, and about the way that embedded knowledge and capability are so often misunderstood in African contexts. Achebe’s reading of the tale is what makes it so powerful. He points out that everyone can see the story being used to maintain a hierarchy: the Snake is an aristocrat who has things like horses because of who he is, not because he can ride well, and the Toad is a commoner whose horsemanship, acquired through years of struggle and practice, does not entitle him to ride in this society. The Hausa who made this story are a monarchical people, and on the surface the tale accords with the ruling values of their political system.

But Achebe goes further, and this is the part that I keep coming back to. He says that the ancient griot who fashioned that story had concealed, in the voluminous folds of its laughter, the hint and the glint of iron. Because the same story that justifies the Snake’s position also exposes him, exposes an unattractive, incompetent, and complacent aristocracy. And in the fullness of time, that same tale will serve a revolutionary purpose. The story is a two edged sword. It can be read as a defence of the way things are, or it can be read as a quiet, devastating critique of systems that allocate power and resources on the basis of position rather than capacity.

That is what I think about when I think about institutions in Africa today. The models, the frameworks, the policy architectures that shape how we understand and govern economies across the continent were, for the most part, designed somewhere else, for someone else, and then applied to our contexts as though they were universal. And like the Snake in the saddle, they persist because of inheritance, because of position, because of the weight of historical arrangement, and not because they are the best or most capable instruments for the job. When those frameworks do not work well for us, the conclusion that gets drawn is that we are the problem, that our cultures are too informal, our institutions too weak, our people too undisciplined. When actually, the far more honest conclusion is that the frameworks themselves were never designed to fit our realities in the first place.

I think about this constantly. In some streets in Nigeria, women levy themselves proportionally to buy a transformer because the state will not provide one. In markets across the country, women trade using systems built on trust, reciprocity, memory, and collective coordination. In Edo State, there are houses that were built without doors, and that was never about poverty; it was about coherence, about embedded trust systems that made doors unnecessary. These are economies that work. They are intelligent. They are organised. And yet, the education system, the policy architecture, the entire institutional apparatus treats none of it as legitimate. It treats it as culture. Or informality. Or survival. But never knowledge and sadly never theory.

And this is where education matters most, because I believe the misalignment starts there. It starts in the classroom, with when a fourteen year old student in Ekiti State sits down to learn economics and encounters a curriculum that describes an economy she has never seen. She learns about central banking, about formal labour markets, about price stabilisation tools. But she never learns about ajo, the rotating savings cooperatives that millions of Nigerians use every single day. She never learns about how market associations coordinate prices. She never learns about the kinship based credit systems her own family uses. And what that teaches her, over time, is that her world is not real economics, or at least not organised or modern enough – and possibly even backward, that her parents’ intelligence is invisible, that the systems her community has built are primitive or inadequate. By the time she gets to university, if she gets there, the hierarchy is already sitting inside her. Formal is good. Informal is bad. Western is rigorous. Local is anecdotal.

This is why the Rethinking Economic Futures for Africa Hub exists. We are a research and translation platform, currently hosted by Ekiti State University for our first three-year wave, and the whole point of what we are doing is to build a space where the questions we ask about Africa’s economic futures actually start from the realities that people on the continent live with every day. We want to begin with the people as they are, with the systems that we have built, with the logics that we live by, and then ask: what kinds of institutions, what kinds of policies, what kinds of research would actually serve these realities? Because the institutional frameworks we have inherited were designed for a different purpose, in a different context, and the fact that they do not always work well for us is evidence that the frameworks themselves need to be rethought.

We now have a growing network of scholars across West Africa and the diaspora, working across economics, public health, education, governance, and development, and the goal is to create a space where this work happens collaboratively, across disciplines, and in genuine partnership with the communities whose lives sit at the centre of it. One of the things I feel most strongly about is that this work has to be done together with communities. We want research that involves people as participants and contributors, where the communities whose lives we are studying are part of shaping the questions, part of interpreting the findings, and part of deciding what happens next. That ethos of co production, of respect for community knowledge, of recognising that the people who live inside an economy understand things about it that no external model can capture, is fundamental to who we are.

And the translation piece matters just as much. It is not enough to produce research that sits in journals. We want to take what we learn and make it usable, legible, and actionable, whether that is for policymakers, practitioners, educators, or the communities themselves. Because the griot’s story, properly read, is already doing what we are trying to do: it takes something everyone thinks they understand, and it turns it over, and it shows you what was always there but hidden in plain sight. The capability exists. The knowledge exists. The intelligence exists. What has been missing is the institutional willingness to recognise it, study it, and build upon it. That is what REFA is for.