News

  • 8 March 2022

To mark this year’s International Women’s Day, Mokoro are delighted to publish a new WOLTS blog by senior team member, Narangerel Yansanjav. The blog, “It will be fun to develop land-use planning, if we do it together”, draws on a series of workshops facilitated by People Centred Conservation (PCC), Mokoro’s Mongolian NGO partner. The online workshops, which brought together over 700 participants comprising local land officers and other government officials, provided the WOLTS team the opportunity to promote more inclusive and gender-equitable decision-making in local land governance processes. The workshops supported the team’s dissemination of new Gender Guidelines which result from a long-running collaboration with the Mongolian government land administration and management agency, ALAMGAC. We are pleased to co-publish this blog simultaneously with the Land Portal.

 

 

  • 16 December 2021

After adapting to challenges of COVID-19, 2021 turned into a very busy and exciting year for the global WOLTS team. This year has been the culmination of five years of field activities in Mongolia and Tanzania, with a strong focus on disseminating what we have learned.

Our key findings can be found in ‘Women and Community Land Rights: Investing in Local Champions’ which was launched in June via a webinar in collaboration with the Land Portal, the International Land Coalition, and our WOLTS partners HakiMadini, in Tanzania, and People Centered Conservation (PCC), in Mongolia. A new WOLTS blog followed in July – ‘To secure equal rights to land, bring men and women together’.  If you missed the webinar you can still watch the recording here and read the Webinar Report including in Mongolian, Kiswahili and French.

Earlier in 2021, the WOLTS team were delighted to share new ‘gender guidelines’ developed in collaboration with the Mongolian government Agency for Land Administration and Management, Geodesy and Cartography (ALAMGAC). The guidelines have been distributed in all 330 districts of Mongolia – see our March blog which describes the collaborative process, and its broader significance. Our PCC team members have just finished facilitating more than thirty online learning workshops with hundreds of district Land Officers from across Mongolia to introduce the guidelines. These workshops were designed to engage key land administration stakeholders and develop their understanding of how to implement gender-sensitive participatory local land planning.

Please do get in touch with any questions and help us to share our materials widely if you can. Watch this space for WOLTS 2022!

Wishing you all the very best for the holiday season and the coming year.

 

 

  • 8 September 2021

The Ethiopia WIDE team are pleased to announce the publication by Hurst publishers (UK) of the book, “Youth on the Move: Views from Below on Ethiopian International Migration”, edited by Asnake Kefale and Fana Gebresenbet, in which three chapters based on the WIDE data are authored by WIDE team members. The book is scheduled for publication in September 2021.

  • 14 July 2021

We are excited to publish a WOLTS blog written by project team leader, Elizabeth Daley. The blog, ‘To secure equal rights to land, bring men and women together’, is a reflective piece focused on the approach undertaken by the WOLTS project team towards strengthening women’s land rights in Mongolian and Tanzanian pastoralist communities. The blog demonstrates the success of the WOLTS methodology using evidence collected from the latest rounds of feedback on the project’s gender and land champions training programme. It stresses the importance of engaging both women and men equally from beginning to end. This latest blog, which has been simultaneously published on the Land Portal, follows on from the recent WOLTS publication of the ‘Women and Community Land Rights: Investing in Local Champions’ report. Mokoro also hosted a webinar in collaboration with the Land Portal and the International Land Coalition, along with project partners People Centered Conservation (PCC) and HakiMadini, to present findings from the WOLTS experience so far. A recording of the webinar is available online as well as the webinar report in English; French, Mongolian and Kiswahili versions will be published at the beginning of August.

  • 16 June 2021

Mokoro is delighted to publish the latest report from the WOLTS Project team; Women and Community Land Rights: Investing in Local Champions. The report, written in collaboration with WOLTS partners People Centered Conservation (PCC) and HakiMadini, presents findings from the project’s work over the past five years in Mongolia and Tanzania, most notably the results of Stage 2 – a 3-year gender and land champions training programme. The publication draws on both qualitative and quantitative evidence to demonstrate the positive impact of the WOLTS Project’s long-term approach to community engagement, as a means to empowering men and women to support their communities as local advocates for land rights and gender equity.

The Women and Community Land Rights: Investing in Local Champions report can be downloaded here. Find other publications on the dedicated WOLTS page here.

The Women and Community Land Rights: Investing in Local Champions webinar took place on 16 June 2021 in collaboration with the Land Portal. The webinar recording and event write-up are available afterwards on the webinar home page here.

  • 11 May 2021

 

You can find details of the event and how to register here

 

 

  • 7 May 2021

The latest Mokoro newsletter has been sent out via email. You can also read it here.

  • 30 March 2021

Mokoro is delighted to share stand-alone online versions of collaborative ‘gender guidelines’ in English and Mongolian with the global land community today. The documents comprise specific technical guidance to strengthen gender-sensitivity and overall inclusiveness of vulnerable groups within Mongolia’s existing public consultations process during medium-term soum development planning, based on the research tools and methodologies developed and used by the Women’s Land Tenure Security project (WOLTS). The ‘gender guidelines’ are the result of a successful collaboration between the Mongolian government Agency for Land Administration and Management, Geodesy and Cartography (ALAMGAC), Mokoro Ltd, and WOLTS project partners, People Centered Conservation (PCC) – a Mongolian NGO – and they have also been included within the latest printing of ALAMGAC’s soum land management planning manual with Mokoro’s support.

Importantly, these new ‘gender guidelines’ provide an example of how to mainstream attention to gender issues – as well as issues for all vulnerable groups – within broader land management planning processes, in a highly participatory, consultative and collaborative way. We hope they will be of interest and relevance to those engaged in local land management planning in other pastoralist regions of the world, as well as to the global community of practice around women’s land rights. We warmly welcome feedback and comments.

The ‘gender guidelines’ are available in English here and in Mongolian here, and the full Mongolian medium-term soum land management planning manual is available in Mongolian here. An article about the collaboration is available here.

 

  • 5 January 2021

We are pleased to share our latest newsletter, which links to blogs, publications and recent assignments completed by Mokoro.
This has been a challenging year for everyone but we have been embracing new ways of working at Mokoro and enjoying closer collaborations with colleagues, partners and clients through online meetings and workshops.
It has also been a very busy year, with plenty of new and exciting assignments to keep us busy, with the added challenges of doing things remotely. We have been undertaking a number of global evaluations, with large geographically-spread teams, including a strategic evaluation of school feeding contribution to the SDGs for the World Food Programme, and an evaluation of Education Cannot Wait’s First Emergency Response funding modality. We have also continued to provide long-term support to the World Food Programme in Kenya, carrying out the monitoring of their Sustainable Food Systems Programme, which involved conducting a remote telephone survey covering over 1,400 households, and the WOLTS team have continued with their gender and land champions training programme, thanks to the invaluable efforts of national partners.
We wish all of our network a very Happy New Year 2021.
  • 14 December 2020

All in all, despite COVID-19, the WOLTS team have had a highly productive year. In 2020 we’ve been adapting, taking stock, writing blogs, and concluding our pilot ‘gender and land champions’ training programme in Mongolia and Tanzania.

Mokoro’s project partners – People Centered Conservation (PCC) in Mongolia and HakiMadini in Tanzania – have successfully completed Round 2 of our four-step training programme on gender and land with community champions, incorporating mentors from among those trained in Round 1. While our training sessions were put on hold in March and April, the team adapted our approach to ensure that the programme could continue safely after lockdowns ended. By the time of writing this update at year end, extensive feedback gathering has also been completed, to help us assess how useful and engaging the training has been, and what wider impacts have been felt in the communities as a result of the entire WOLTS programme.

The WOLTS team’s frequent visits to the study communities have elicited new evidence and stories that inspired six blogs we co-published with the Land Portal in 2020. In January, Team Leader Elizabeth Daley wrote a reflective piece titled ‘Putting research into action – One muddy step at a time’, which looked at some of the positive outcomes of our WOLTS project since its inception in 2015.

The ‘WOLTS Team Perspectives’ series was then launched in February, receiving a great response online. The series comprises blogs from different WOLTS team members, beginning with ‘Seats of power – women’s land rights and chairs’ written by HakiMadini’s Joyce Ndakaru. In this blog, Joyce described her upbringing in a traditional and patriarchal Maasai village and reflected on how the WOLTS project has been delivering positive changes to gender relations in similar contexts in seemingly small but significant ways. In March, we published the second blog in the series, by HakiMadini’s Emmanuel Mbise. In ‘How role-play changed two Maasai communities’, Emmanuel reflected on the power of role-plays about women’s land rights performed by participants during the WOLTS champions training sessions. In our third blog from HakiMadini – ‘How Anna Letaiko got her land’, published in April – Ezekiel Kereri explored how the WOLTS training programme on gender equity has given female community champions the confidence to claim their rights to land, and male community champions the confidence and understanding to support them.

Two further blogs were written from the Mongolian perspective, starting with ‘Young WOLTS champions offer hope for Mongolia’s herding future’, published in July by PCC team member Suvd Boldbaatar. Suvd’s blog told the story of a young herder who did not follow his peers to Mongolia’s cities in search of higher education and employment opportunities, but instead became a WOLTS community champion on gender and land. This man is the kind of dynamic young leader who can help to ensure a sustainable future for Mongolia’s traditional way of life. In September, we published ‘How Covid-19 is bringing Mongolia’s herding families back together’, by our PCC colleague B. Munkhtuvshin. This blog looked at the unexpected positive effects that COVID-19 has had on a Mongolian herder family whom Munkhtuvshin previously wrote about in 2019.

We are now taking stock of the rich body of evidence we have gathered through all of our WOLTS activities over the past five years. We look forward to sharing findings from our pilot ‘gender and land champions’ training programme in the first quarter of 2021, and to launching a set of step-by-step guidelines to support participatory, gender-equitable land management in Mongolia. We wish you all well for the holiday season and the coming year, and take this opportunity to congratulate the whole WOLTS team for their tremendous resilience and achievements in a very difficult year.