Rethinking Economic Futures for Africa
Building economic thinking and institutional design that works from African realities outward.
REFA is a research and translational platform dedicated to excavating, understanding, and building on the economic, social, and institutional logics that already organise life across African societies, and translating that understanding into institutions, policies, and systems that are coherent, credible, and designed to serve the people they were meant for.
What the REFA Hub Is
The REFA Hub is a research and translational 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 built through genuine engagement with local knowledge systems.
The Hub connects three strands: the Research Network (where discovery happens through cross-disciplinary scholarship), the REFA Project (where findings move into institutional pilots, policy design, and community engagement), and the REFA Charter (where institutions commit to co-producing alternatives grounded in the societies they serve). Each strand has its own rhythm and logic, but they share a common intellectual commitment: to take African contexts seriously as sources of institutional innovation, and to build systems that make sense to the people who use them.
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 custodians.
Translate
Every stream of inquiry has a pathway to implementation. Research moves into institutional pilots, policy prototypes, and community-based work.
Build
Co-producing institutional alternatives with the systems and societies they are meant to serve, designing for coherence rather than compliance.
Leadership
Dr Ruth Badru
University of Bristol, UK
Dr Omowumi Idowu
Ekiti State University, Nigeria
Dr Oluwasola Emmanuel Omoju
National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies, Nigeria
Institutional Host: Ekiti State University, Nigeria
A Distributed Research Fellowship
The REFA Research Network brings together scholars, educators, policymakers, and community practitioners working across disciplines, institutions, and geographies. Fellows are embedded researchers, local custodians, and designers conducting discovery-led research grounded in lived systems, building formal theory from embedded practice, and engaging directly with policy, education, and governance actors.
Fellowship means intellectual seriousness, methodological pluralism, and a commitment to treating African contexts as sources of innovation rather than sites of deficit.
Research Focus Areas
The Network is organised around thematic research streams, each addressing a distinct dimension of institutional and economic life across African societies.
Education and Institutional Agency
How curricula, pedagogy, and institutional design shape reasoning, confidence, and agency across educational settings.
Economics and Macroeconomic Design
How communities organise economic life, and how macroeconomic frameworks can be built from those lived realities.
Health, Well-being, and Institutional Fit
How institutional design shapes health outcomes, and how systems of care can be made coherent with the communities they serve.
Trust, Legitimacy, and Performance
Context-sensitive tools for measuring how institutions earn trust, build legitimacy, and deliver for the people they serve.
Governance and Legislative Prototyping
Embedded governance norms and their translation into workable policy prototypes, legislative frameworks, and institutional models.
Environment and Resource Governance
Embedded tenure, stewardship, and resource-use logics in environmental governance and climate adaptation.
From Research to Practice
The REFA Project is the operational arm of the Hub, where research moves into institutional pilots, policy design, and community-based engagement. Every stream of inquiry is designed with a translation pathway built in from the start, ensuring that findings do not stay in journals but move into settings where they can be tested, refined, and embedded in real institutional practice.
The Project works with universities, ministries, agencies, and communities willing to co-produce institutional alternatives grounded in coherence, building systems that make sense to the people who use them rather than requiring those people to adapt to systems adopted without engaging their knowledge and lived experience.
Institutional Commitment to Building Differently
The REFA Charter is a formal commitment framework through which universities, ministries, agencies, funders, and other institutional actors declare their readiness to engage substantively with the work of redesigning institutional practice, to question what counts as evidence, what counts as success, and what counts as a legitimate starting point for policy, education, and governance.
The Charter asks institutions and funders to think carefully about how they design, administer, and evaluate their work, and to co-produce alternatives that are grounded in the realities of the societies they serve. It is a commitment to coherence as the first criterion for institutional design, and to sustained partnership over quick wins.
The Charter is currently in development. We are working with our first institutional partners to finalise the commitments and open it for formal signature. If your institution is interested in becoming a founding signatory, please get in touch.
Find Your Place in the Work
REFA is a multi-stranded initiative. Whether you are a researcher, institution, policymaker, community practitioner, or funder, there is a meaningful role for you.
Join the Research Network
We are expanding our fellowship across disciplines, geographies, and career stages. If your work engages with institutional design, education, governance, health, or development practice in African contexts, we want to hear from you.
Express InterestBecome a Charter Signatory
If your institution is ready to engage substantively with the work of co-producing institutional alternatives grounded in the societies it serves, the REFA Charter provides a formal commitment framework.
Register InterestFund the Work
We work with international research funders, philanthropic foundations, and African funding bodies. If you are a funder interested in supporting discovery-led, translational research, we welcome a conversation about alignment.
Discuss FundingCollaborate on Practice
If you are a policymaker, legislative actor, or community leader working at the boundary between formal institutional systems and lived realities, we are interested in partnerships that move from diagnosis to design.
Propose CollaborationGet in Touch
Whether you are a researcher, institution, funder, or policymaker, we welcome your enquiry.
General Enquiries
Institutional Host
Ekiti State University, Ado-Ekiti, Nigeria