From early in my time at boarding school in eSwatini in the 1960s to just a couple of years ago, the BBC World Service was a central part of my life when I was outside the UK. For much of my life, in other words. ...

“You know it’s not really British Africa”, said the man on the British bus. I was nine or ten years old, making my way across town to my primary school, proudly clutching the Atlas Of British Africa that I had ...

In 1964, I went with my parents and my brother to live in Lesotho. Since then, there have only been two years when I did not set foot there at all. In quite a few years, I was living and working there. Across all ...

Stephen Turner is a Mokoro Principal Consultant. This year he worked as co-team leader (with a Senior Evaluation Adviser in the United Nations World Food Programme’s Office of Evaluation) of a strategic evaluation ...

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 ...

This is written at the desk of Martin Adams, who has been a leading figure in Mokoro for several decades but, sadly, announced his retirement at the company’s Quarterly Meeting, just hosted by him and Gerda at ...

The Kenyan authorities recently calculated that traffic jams in Nairobi cost the economy $600,000 per day. That’s one city I haven’t had the pleasure of visiting recently, but a couple of others have been ...

In probably my shortest field mission so far, I recently spent two nights and three days in Botswana and Zimbabwe, scoping some proposed work on enhancing rural infrastructure. I had at least expected to spend the ...

I have sometimes been tempted to speculate that if the agricultural extension service in African country x or y were to be closed down overnight, the only people who would notice would be the staff themselves. I ...