The proximate reason I started the 1864 Institute is a frustration I have carried for some years. I have spent my career producing research that meets rigorous methodological standards. Peer-reviewed. Reproducible. Published. And I have watched, too often, as that research circulates within academic networks and never reaches the institutions that could act on it.
The research-to-policy gap is real, and in Nigeria it is wide. There are structural reasons for this. Institutions operate under immediate pressures and cannot always engage with the longer timelines of academic research. Researchers, trained to write for other researchers, often do not know how to make their findings legible to government audiences.
A different model
Research that is designed without a user in mind tends not to find one. When I look at the evidence work that does change things in Nigerian government, it is almost always produced by people who spent significant time inside the institutions they were studying. Who understood not just the policy problem but the operational reality. Who built relationships before they produced findings.
The 1864 Institute is my attempt to build something that is, from the start, designed to close that gap. Not research that eventually becomes policy, but work that is embedded in institutions as it is produced, and that leaves behind tools, systems, and people who can continue after the researcher has moved on.