It feels as though I’ve waited almost a whole career for this to happen. Perhaps that’s because my daughter, Hebe, is here in Dakar to attend the dialogue event on agriculture that is being organised by the Collaborative African Budget Reform Initiative (CABRI). Hebe has just finished her second year at Uni, where she is…

I read the two papers on agricultural extension in Africa by esteemed and expert colleagues with interest. My own thoughts are those of a lay person but who in recent years has learnt a little more on the complexity of the topic. Two streams of ideas came to my mind. One about ‘us here’ in…

On Saturday 15th June 2013 a small but select group of people gathered at Mokoro’s office in Oxford to remember and celebrate the work of Kaori Izumi. Kaori very sadly passed away in March 2013 after a long illness. Mokoro’s Robin Palmer, a long-time colleague and close friend of Kaori and her family, travelled to…

Back in July last year, I dropped in at the friendly Mokoro office to see a couple of people and found myself, against my better judgment, agreeing to take part in a project on producing guidance for pooled funding of basic service delivery in fragile and conflict-affected states (FCAS) (trips off the tongue nicely). My…

After a long battle against cancer, my friend Kaori Izumi died at her home in Sapporo, Japan, on 7 March 2013, aged 56. She was a truly remarkable person, a campaigner for women’s land rights in a context of HIV and Aids in Southern Africa, an activist, a mover and shaker, someone who really made…

In January’s newsletter, Mokoro’s Stephen Turner reflected on agricultural extension in Africa. Here Ray Purcell and Martin Adams provide their responses to these articles. If you have any responses to articles in this edition that you would like to be included in the next newsletter, please email us. Ray Purcell “I think Stephen picked up…

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 have certainly seen plenty of extension services that were making little or no practical difference to the productivity…

I’ve always enjoyed conferences in the Netherlands – land grabbing in The Hague, land and law in Leiden, livelihoods in Amsterdam, and many more. So I decided to invite myself to the conference on Gender and Land Governance at the University of Utrecht, 14-15 January, and happily they accepted my invitation! Utrecht is a very…

According to the 2012 HIV/AIDS global fact sheet (www.kff.org), some 70% of those infected with HIV/AIDS live in Sub-Saharan Africa, which provides a home for some 12% of the world’s population. Further, 94% of the world’s children who have HIV are estimated to live in SSA. Swaziland with 25.9% is believed to have the highest…

Mokoro started its series of 2013 seminars on an innovative note discussing the subject of “Ethiopian Rural Communities: Where are they headed?”. Many guests in attendance had spent a number of years living or working in Ethiopia (as academics, consultants, development practitioners), and others came with a genuine interest in the subject matter, all ready…