Context-aware mobile learning applications provide learning materials to suit the needs of individual learners. Despite several applications developed, there is a lack of architectural support for developing these applications. This has resulted in a number of challenges; lack of standardization, poor quality of developed applications, and reliability. Motivated by this shortcoming, a reference architecture was designed using requirements gathered from twenty-four context-aware mobile learning applications. The reference architecture provides architectural support for context capturing and processing. Evaluation of the reference architecture was conducted, and the results indicate that it solves the motivated problem and also consolidates necessary requirements.