ALLIANCE POUR REFONDER LA GOUVERNANCE EN AFRIQUE ARGA

Their core work

ARGA is a Dakar-based African governance NGO whose core mission is reforming governance structures in fragile and conflict-affected states across Africa. In EU-funded research, they function as a regional field knowledge partner — bringing African civil society perspectives on how external interventions, security policies, and counter-extremism programs are perceived and received at the community level. Their contribution to consortia is grounded in conflict-sensitive analysis, local legitimacy assessments, and the practical dynamics of governance in Sahel and broader African contexts. They translate field realities into policy-relevant findings, bridging the gap between European research frameworks and on-the-ground African experience.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

In their first H2020 project (EUNPACK, 2016-2019), ARGA's focus was evaluative and critical — analyzing how the EU's crisis response approach played out in practice versus intention, with emphasis on local perceptions and conflict sensitivity. By their second project (PREVEX, 2020-2023), the framing shifted from critique to construction: the keywords move toward prevention, resilience, enabling environments, and gender sensitivity, reflecting a transition from analyzing what goes wrong to contributing to what should be built. This suggests ARGA has evolved from a watchdog voice on external interventions toward a constructive partner in designing community-grounded prevention frameworks.

ARGA is moving from evaluating external security interventions toward actively co-designing prevention and resilience frameworks, positioning them for future work in community-level counter-terrorism, governance capacity-building, and context-sensitive security programming.

How they like to work

ARGA participates exclusively as a consortium partner — they have never led a project — indicating their value to consortia is as a specialist contributor rather than an organizer or driver. Their two projects both involved large, multi-country consortia (21 partners across 17 countries), showing they are accustomed to complex international research settings. This pattern suggests they are brought in specifically for their regional expertise and field access, making them a reliable but narrowly-scoped partner whose strongest contribution is anchoring research in African civil society realities.

Despite only two projects, ARGA has connected with 21 partners across 17 countries — reflecting the broad international consortia typical of H2020 societal and security research. Their network almost certainly spans European universities, policy institutes, and other civil society organizations working on governance, conflict, and security in Africa and the MENA region.

What sets them apart

As one of very few Sub-Saharan African NGOs active in H2020 security research, ARGA offers a perspective that European institutions cannot generate internally: authentic civil society expertise rooted in African governance reform and conflict-affected environments. For any consortium working on EU external policy, extremism prevention, or crisis response, ARGA provides the African field voice that satisfies both scientific validity and community legitimacy requirements. Their Senegal base places them at the intersection of Francophone West Africa and Sahel security dynamics — a geography that is increasingly central to EU security policy.

Highlights from their portfolio

• EUNPACK
  One of the few H2020 projects to formally evaluate EU foreign and security policy from the recipient side, with ARGA lending direct African civil society legitimacy to a critique of the EU's own crisis response machinery.
• PREVEX
  Placed ARGA inside a major violent extremism prevention study spanning the Balkans and MENA, demonstrating that their expertise travels beyond African contexts into broader global security research.