A small desk that publishes
in the open.

Most of the research that matters to African markets is either locked behind a subscription, written for a committee, or never written down at all. The people it describes rarely get to read it. We started publishing because the alternative — good work dying inside a slide deck — had become the norm.

So the desk keeps a single discipline: if we studied it, we write it up. If we wrote it up, we publish it. The catalogue that results is deliberately mixed — peer-reviewed journal articles sit beside policy audits, documentary biography, and bylined journalism, because the questions do not respect those boundaries either.

The work is authored by a standing group rather than a single byline. Olorunfemi Obasa leads the desk and carries most first-author credits; Dr. Precious Obasa (née Olusegun) brings the doctoral and quantitative discipline, including the peer-reviewed SAGE Open study on Nigerian e-commerce founders.

Temitope Obasa, Oluwatoni Abraham, Itunu Ijila, Victoria Oladipo and Oluwatobiloba Obasa appear across the audit, history and access papers. Named co-authors are listed on every entry in the catalogue — never buried in an institutional credit.

Lagos and Nicosia, mostly. Field research has run through Abeokuta, Northern Cyprus, and seven countries across the continent and the diaspora for the Africa 80 collaboration. That geography is not incidental: it is why the desk is sceptical of statistics produced far from the places they claim to describe.

Every published paper is open access. Cite it, teach it, quote it, argue with it — attribution is the only ask. If you want a copy of an archived item, or you would like the desk to speak, write to the address below and a human will answer.

The standards each paper must clear before it leaves the desk are set out in the methodology.