“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 painstakingly made for a school project. On each page, a traced map of a different…

Dear Evaluation Manager Thank you for asking us about the commenting process for the draft report we have just submitted. We don’t have much time if a revised report is to be circulated before the holiday season. However, we see this as an opportunity to pilot a remedy for the commentovirus pandemic that is debilitating…

In this article Catherine Dom reviews Land to the Tiller: an interview with Zegeye Asfaw by Ann Oosthuizen. This is an interview with Zegeye Asfaw from 2012, telling the story of his life, of the struggle for land reform in Ethiopia, and of the personal cost of that struggle for himself and others.   Land to the Tiller…

In central Mongolia, the summer is warm and soft rain falls on the steppes. For herders like Baasandorj, it is a busy time of year, filled with combing sheep’s wool, milking cows and making dairy products for the winter. I first met Baasandorj in February 2018 while carrying out a baseline survey for a long-term…

“It’s hard to find the right life partner in my soum (district). Most of the girls went to school, then to university in the city. Not many of them are good at herding.” Like most young women who grew up in the city, I usually think of herders as quiet men with closed faces that…

In this article Robin Palmer reviews Land to the Tiller: an interview with Zegeye Asfaw by Ann Oosthuizen. This is an interview with Zegeye Asfaw from 2012, telling the story of his life, of the struggle for land reform in Ethiopia, and of the personal cost of that struggle for himself and others.   This…

Anna Letaiko is a middle-aged woman with a soft voice that carries wisdom and strength. Her husband is an older man, and together they live in small mud house in Mundarara – a remote village in Longido district in Tanzania, accessible only by a rough dirt road. It is a Maasai community similar to the…

As a Swahili speaker from Tanzania, I have not often had the opportunity to meet or work with people from remote Maasai communities. However, I recently visited the villages of Naisinyai and Mundarara in the north of the country as part of a global research project on women’s land rights in pastoral communities affected by…

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 the others (except 1972 and 1975), I have made many short…

When I was young, I was taught through my Maasai heritage that a woman is the property of her husband and is valued on the basis of how many children she can produce – and not by her education or economic success. I was also taught that the position of Maasai women is lower than…