Just over 40 years ago, in September 1977, James Currey, then still with Heinemann Educational Books, published two academic books of mine. The first was Land and Racial Domination in Rhodesia, based on my 1968 PhD. The second was a collection which I co-edited with Neil Parsons, The Roots of Rural Poverty in Central and…

Education Cannot Wait (ECW) is a global fund that was launched at the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 with the aim to transform how education in emergencies and protracted crises is prioritized, resourced, planned and programmed and transitioned into development. No mean feat, especially in the current environment. During 5-7 September 2017 I, along with…

Back in 2002 my Oxfam colleague Thalia Kidder, a Latin America specialist, arranged for me to visit organizations working on land rights in Honduras and Guatemala en route to an Oxfam conference in Haiti. I have never forgotten that visit. The worst that could happen to the land activists I then worked with in parts…

School feeding has been part of the global portfolio of the World Food Programme (WFP) for the last 45 years. Through its long-term engagement in this area the agency has become a leading player worldwide. The programme is implemented under Strategic Objective 4 of WFP’s Strategic Plan 2014-2017, to “reduce undernutrition and break the intergenerational…

We were very sorry to learn of the passing of Christopher Colclough on 28 June 2017. Chris was a close friend and colleague to many at Mokoro, having begun his career in the Ministry of Finance and Development in Botswana, where the founders of Mokoro also first met, and since then providing advisory inputs and…

There’s no point trying to hide it: I suffer from Ageing Consultant’s Syndrome. The older I get, the more people ask me to work on evaluations, rather than on planning (a forward-looking younger person’s pastime?), managing, or (most rarely) direct implementation. Evaluations are important, should be (and often are) rigorous, and tend to keep the…

In March I was pleased to attend the Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty on behalf of Mokoro, alongside Chris Tanner. With more than 1,250 participants from over 130 countries, representing government, academia, civil society and the private sector, the Land Conference continues to be the leading global forum on land governance. This…

Livelihoods, food, shelter, identity: for millions of women and men around the world, land and its related resources are central to survival. Three out of four people currently living in poverty survive on farming[1] as a means of supporting themselves, their families and communities, which places the role of equitable access to land very high…

In summer 2016, a Mokoro team travelled to Sri Lanka to undertake a Country Portfolio Evaluation for the World Food Programme (WFP). Participating in the evaluation was a fascinating introduction to the wonderful country and people of Sri Lanka, its diverse history and geography. The Sri Lankan context, as explored in the evaluation report, sums…

On 10th March at Wolfson College in Oxford, Mokoro screened “Land Grabbing”, a film by Kurt Langbein and Christian Bruser. This beautifully shot film follows incidences of land grabbing from the perspective of multinational corporations, private investors, politicians and affected communities. Director Kurt Langbein was able to attend the screening and shed more light on…