Narangerel Yansanjav is a senior researcher and board member of the Mongolian NGO, People Centered Conservation (PCC), and a senior team member of the global WOLTS project.   “I am one of the woman-headed households in this soum. I have been a herder for many years. For me life is still good, because I have…

On 11 January 2019 Mokoro was delighted to host a seminar on qualitative evidence-gathering methods. Following our previous seminar on collecting evidence for development, this seminar looked further into some of the qualitative approaches available and their use by and usefulness for policy makers and practitioners. Our panel of four was chaired by Catherine Dom…

Antony Ellman, a long-standing friend of Mokoro, has co-authored this book on sustainable agricultural production in East Africa, published in September 2018 by the Tanzania Publishing House, Mkuki na Nyota.  It is targeted primarily at agricultural college and university teachers and students in East Africa, but early indications suggest that it will be of interest…

  On 20 November 2018 the 2019 Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report was launched in London at an event hosted by UKFIET, along with BAICE, with approximately 150 people attending. Other launch events happened on the same day in Berlin, Bangkok and Nairobi, with more events scheduled over the following few months. The 2019 GEM…

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…