In 2020 a Mokoro team conducted the annual outcome monitoring for WFP Kenya’s Sustainable Food Systems Programme under restrictions imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. In a previous article, Mokoro’s Survey Coordinator, Ernest Midega, presented some of the innovations introduced to ensure remote data collection from 1,460 households across the arid counties was possible. In 2021,…

It’s that time of year again! March means International Women’s Day and the annual meeting of the UN Commission on the Status of Women. It’s not surprising, after COP26 in Glasgow, that this year’s CSW66 links gender equality with climate change. The official theme is ‘achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and…

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. Radio Swaziland used to relay the World Service news bulletins…

“It will be fun to develop land-use planning, if we do it together.” This was a comment from one of the local land managers during 30 online workshops run by PCC to introduce new Gender Guidelines for local land management in Mongolia. The workshops, held in November and December 2021, involved almost 700 local land…

There is an underlying tension in the land rights movement that is rarely addressed head on, which is the perception that securing women’s land rights threatens community land rights. Community land rights are typically held by indigenous people, small-scale and subsistence farmers, pastoralists, herders and many other groups who are directly dependent on land for…

I had the pleasure of working in the Botswana civil service in the 1970s, but not via the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) fellowship route. I worked as a contracted officer in the Ministry of Agriculture where Andrew Bird and I worked closely together for a time. Andrew gave me my first lesson in how to…

These are strange times currently as we all know, but I was very surprised recently to receive, quite out of the blue, three curious calls on my time.   Land, HIV and AIDS  On 11th March I received an email from Emma Gillies of the University of British Columbia. She and her team are looking…

Sound, sustainable land management is critical to the long-term viability of Mongolia’s traditional herding way of life. And careful planning at local level, in a participatory and gender-inclusive way, is needed to underpin that. In August 2018, Mongolia’s Agency for Land Administration and Management, Geodesy and Cartography (ALAMGAC), embarked on a formal collaboration to develop…

Since 2019 Mokoro have been carrying out the long-term monitoring and evaluation of WFP Kenya’s Sustainable Food Systems Programme (2018-2023) which is being implemented in 14 arid and semi-arid areas of Kenya. In 2020 the annual outcome monitoring was hampered by the restrictions of the Covid-19 pandemic. This article, written by Mokoro’s Survey Coordinator, Ernest…

“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…