Catherine Dom, one of our Principal Consultants, spoke at an International Development Department guest seminar at the University of Birmingham. Her presentation was titled ’Researching change and continuity in rural Ethiopia: 20 villages over 20 years – the WIDE research project’ and the podcast is now available.

Mokoro’s Autumn seminar on Women’s Economic Empowerment was a great success. Further details about the speakers and links to the presentations are available on our seminars page.

A Mokoro Team, led by Stephen Lister, is carrying out the Independent Comprehensive Evaluation (ICE) of the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement. The Inception Report is now available on the SUN website.

A Mokoro Principal Consultant, Ray Purcell, has had an article on Agriculture Policy Changes in Africa published in the Governance for Development Yearbook.The article gives recommendations for ensuring that governance of land use and agriculture is made effective and postitely impacts public expenditure through strong government policy formulation. The article also considers the effect of government policies and budgeting on the private sector. As an interesting note to consider, it relates to work done by Kit Nicholson for CABRI.

We are please to announce Mokoro’s next seminar “Nutrition, Food Security and Livelihoods”, which will be held in Oxford on Friday 2 May 2014. The seminar will start with tea and coffee at 10.00. See the full agenda and details of the seminar here.

Mokoro’s latest newsletter has been sent by email. The newsletter includes five articles from Mokoro Consultants and friends, as well as updates on our recent assignments and from the Land Rights in Africa website. View the newsletter here.

On 2 April Robin Palmer attended the launch in Birkbeck College, London, of the McAuslan Fund set up to commemorate the life and work of the late Law Professor Patrick McAuslan who died in January. Below are a few words from Robin on the event.

“Martin Adams, Liz Daley and I wrote a combined appreciation of Patrick in a previous newsletter tribute and Liz and I also wrote individual pieces which were posted on Birkbeck’s tribute page.

It was a fine launch. The speeches were really good, a mix of the poignant and the entertaining, which well captured Patrick’s essence and clearly brought out the themes of social justice and making the law work in practice for poor people. I spoke to some of Patrick’s former students and learnt that they greatly appreciated his lectures, which didn’t surprise me at all.

Funding has now been secured for an initial scholarship for someone from East Africa to study law at Birkbeck. I hope that funds will later become available to support the kind of gatherings Patrick would have approved of.

Valerie Kelly, Research and Publications Officer in Birkbeck’s School of Law, who organized the launch, wrote to me afterwards to say that ‘it was really nice to have someone from Mokoro present, having heard about the organisation from Patrick.’

The latest e-newsletter has been sent out and includes a review of our recent Education Seminar. The articles can be read here.

Robin Palmer has had his review of Professor Patrick McAuslan’s book ’Land Law Reform in Eastern Africa: Traditional or transformative? A critical review of 50 years of land law reform in eastern Africa 1961-2011’ published by African Affairs. The article is available online here.

We were deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Professor Patrick McAuslan on Saturday 11th January 2014, a former Associate of Mokoro and a good friend, colleague and mentor to three of our Principal Consultants. Patrick has been a tremendous inspiration to a great many people working in the fields of land reform, land tenure and land law. His work over the past 50 years has had a major influence on shaping the land laws and tenure policies of a great many countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Middle East. Some of this is reflected in his seminal book, published last year by Routledge, Land Law Reform in Eastern Africa: Traditional or transformative? A critical review of 50 years of land law reform in eastern Africa 1961-2011 (Review by Robin Palmer, Mokoro). We will miss Patrick very much and extend our deepest condolences to his wife Dorrette, their daughter Fiona, and family and friends.