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…

On 3 October Oxfam released its latest report on land grabs – ‘Our Land, Our Lives’ – calling on the World Bank to put in place a six-month moratorium on its lending for land-based investments in developing countries. On the same day, in India, the Jan Satyagraha (March for Justice) started, with over 50,000 poor…

In the previous Mokoro Newsletter, Daniela Huamán Rodríguez wrote engagingly about her ‘Unexpected Aventura Moçambicana’ on women’s land rights with Martin Adams and Liz Daley. In recent Mokoro seminars, Chris Tanner and Joe Hanlon have shared with us their long experiences of that country. On 4 October, Mozambique celebrated the 20th anniversary of a peace…

On October 10 2012, a group of Mokoro consultants and associates gathered for a discussion led by Dr Jean Boulton on complexity theory and its implications for development practice. Jean, a Senior Research Fellow from the University of Bath and a management consultant, has a background in physics and has spent many years working on…

The BSI model It is for a little more than a year and a half that I have been working alongside a bunch of great colleagues for the Budget Strengthening Initiative programme (BSI), hosted by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI). In this paper I share what are personal reflections arising from this work. BSI is…