It’s 9am and I’m putting out the last of the chairs in the workshop, while my colleague Jorge fixes balloons to the wall either side of the sign that reads “FELICIDADES!” (congratulations). The guests are already starting to arrive, and I can tell which town each has travelled from today by the style of traje…

Ethiopia WIDE has been part of Mokoro’s life since 2009, almost a decade now. As a research project ‘tracking communities since 1994’, WIDE will celebrate its 25th birthday in 2019.  Its origins and first two incarnations were in academic research.  In 1994 researchers from Addis Ababa and Oxford Universities selected a number of sites in…

Stephen Turner is a Mokoro Principal Consultant. This year he worked as co-team leader (with a Senior Evaluation Adviser in the United Nations World Food Programme’s Office of Evaluation) of a strategic evaluation of WFP’s pilot Country Strategic Plans. CSPs are part of a major transformation of the way WFP plans and structures its services….

You know how they say your life can change in a moment? Well, just over 30 years ago I walked into a room in the Ministry of Agriculture in the southern African country of Malawi.  I had come to collect some agricultural data.  I opened the door and there was a young woman, with dark curly hair, a…

This piece is a personal take, based on a presentation prompted by my local Rotary Club on the Welsh borders. They pursued me for a decade to speak about working internationally. Since 2017 was the 50th anniversary of taking up my first job, I thought I’d take a quick look at how things have gone….

There is a growing demand for the production of evidence in the international development sector to ensure that programmes and initiatives are generating their intended results. For those working in the sector there is now a familiar cycle of reviews, assessments and evaluations designed to serve the mutually reinforcing purposes of accountability and learning. These…

Ahead of September’s Global Youth Economic Opportunities Summit, Adam Leach offers reflections and a reminder of the 2017 Summit hosted by Making Cents International. The call to action at the last Global Youth Economic Opportunities Summit was “connect, exchange, impact”, to highlight the importance of cross-sector collaboration and to promote closer alignment in supply of…

Lkhamdulam is a founding member of the Mongolian NGO, People Centered Conservation (PCC), and a senior team member of the global Women’s Land Tenure Security (WOLTS) project. At a recent gender training session in Mongolia, a middle-aged man used the old Mongolian saying that “a woman has long hair and a short brain” when we…

An informal round-table discussion was chaired by Robin Palmer on 19 April 2018, with invited speakers Odenda Lumumba, Martin Adams and Francesca Di Matteo.  Discussions took place under Chatham House rules to enable the speakers to be frank about their engagements in land reform in Kenya.  The discussion considered the recent history of land reform…

Jim (Mokoro Ltd, UK) and Ezekiel (HakiMadini, Tanzania) are team members of the global Women’s Land Tenure Security (WOLTS) project. I joined the WOLTS project team in November 2015 and in January 2017 I took part in participatory fieldwork in our two pilot communities in Tanzania. I met Ezekiel Kereri at this time, a fellow…