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…

I have now been running the Land Rights in Africa website for 20 years. It existed in Oxfam space from 2000-2012 and has been in Mokoro space since 2012. So a HUGE THANK YOU to Mokoro for agreeing to take on the site in 2012 when Oxfam suddenly pulled the plug – and for maintaining…

I write this blog as our project team embarks on a fifth year of work on women’s land tenure security (WOLTS) with pastoral communities in mining-affected areas of Mongolia and Tanzania. Just before Christmas 2019, we were in Mundarara village in northern Tanzania. Exceptionally heavy rains made getting around much more challenging than usual. Locals…

Every week I receive an email from the pressure group GRAIN offering updates on the global land grab and the varied responses to it. From time to time I forward some of these to Zoe Millington to be posted on Mokoro’s Land Rights in Africa website. I found it really striking that in the week…

Ruby mining is driving rapid expansion of the Tanzanian village of Mundarara. While earnings from mining are providing new opportunities for the majority Maasai population, two members of the community spoke to Jim Grabham about the socio-cultural impacts of the mining boom and the threats facing the pastoralist way of life. Rosa Lopelel was returning…

Mokoro’s evaluation of UNICEF’s contribution to education in humanitarian settings is currently in full swing, and we felt this was an opportune time to convene a seminar exploring this nascent and important branch of humanitarian action. As such, on 21 June 2019 we were extremely excited to welcome several practitioners working at the forefront of…

On 1st May 2019, Mokoro welcomed Rachael Knight to Oxford to share some of her experiences and insights gained from 15 years working at the forefront of community land rights. Rachael, an attorney with expertise in land tenure security, access to justice, and legal empowerment of the poor, helped to found Namati, a global legal…

I couldn’t have been more delighted that Rachael Knight’s May Day Mokoro seminar on community land rights in Africa was such an unqualified success. Why so? Well, it goes back to my early links with Mokoro. These came largely through Martin Adams while I was working as a land rights adviser in Africa for Oxfam….

B. Munkhtuvshin is a researcher with Mongolian NGO People Centered Conservation (PCC). PCC is partnering with Mokoro in a 4-year participatory research programme on Women’s Land Tenure Security (WOLTS) in pastoral communities.   One snowy winter’s day I went to a small winter camp of just two households 140 km from the nearest soum (district)…