News

  • 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.

  • 3 September 2020

A recent Evaluation of UNICEF contribution to Education in Humanitarian Settings, led by Muriel Visser, has been published. The evaluation was designed to determine the extent to which the UNICEF approach to education in humanitarian contexts is ‘fit-for-purpose’ to deliver equitable access to quality education in humanitarian contexts. The evaluation was particularly timely in light of global normative shifts around equity, inclusion and quality of education. The recommendations in the report have been endorsed UNICEF and the synthesis report, as well as country case-study reports for Somalia, Jordan and Nepal, are available on the Mokoro website.

  • 1 September 2020

Mokoro is delighted to publish a fifth blog in the ‘WOLTS Team Perspectives’ series, titled ‘How COVID-19 is bringing Mongolia’s herding families back together’. The new blog is written by our WOLTS Mongolia field team member, B. Munkhtuvshin, and it is co-published with the Land Portal. B. Munkhtuvshin works with the Mongolian NGO, People Centered Conservation, which has partnered with Mokoro on the WOLTS project since 2016. WOLTS Team Perspectives is a blog series that presents the views of different members of the global WOLTS team about the impacts of the project’s action-research on gender, land and mining among pastoralist communities in Tanzania and Mongolia. This latest blog looks at the unexpected positive effects that COVID-19 has had on a Mongolian herder family whom the author has written about before. The piece provokes questions around how formal schooling constrains traditional nomadic culture, and about which of the temporary measures adopted during the pandemic should be considered for making permanent.

Read B. Munkhtuvshin’s blog here, and sign up to keep in touch with WOLTS via our webpage here.

 

 

 

  • 27 July 2020

Mokoro are delighted to publish a fourth blog in the ‘WOLTS Team Perspectives’ series, titled ‘Young champions – hope for Mongolia’s herding traditions’. The new blog is written by our WOLTS Mongolia field team member, Suvd Boldbaatar, and it is co-published with the Land Portal. Suvd works with the Mongolian NGO, People Centered Conservation, which has partnered with Mokoro on the WOLTS project since 2016. Our blog series showcases the views of different members of the global WOLTS team about the impacts of the project’s action-research on gender, land and mining among pastoralist communities in Tanzania and Mongolia. WOLTS Team Perspectives No.4 tells the story of a young herder who has not followed his peers to Mongolia’s cities in search of higher education and employment opportunities. Instead, he has become a WOLTS community champion on gender and land, and is the kind of dynamic young leader who can help to ensure a sustainable future for Mongolia’s traditional way of life.

 

Read Suvd’s blog here, and sign up to keep in touch with WOLTS via our webpage here.

 

  • 21 July 2020

‘WOLTS Team Perspectives’ is a new series of blogs launched in February 2020 by the global WOLTS team. In this series, field team members share their views about the impacts of the project’s action-research on gender, land and mining among pastoralist communities in Tanzania and Mongolia. So far, three blogs have been written by team members from HakiMadini, our WOLTS project partners in Tanzania, and all published jointly on the Mokoro and Land Portal websites. Joyce Ndakaru describes her upbringing in a traditional and patriarchal Maasai village, and how the WOLTS project is delivering positive changes to gender relations in similar contexts. Emmanuel Mbise reflects on the power of role-plays about women’s land rights performed by WOLTS community champions. Ezekiel Kereri describes how the WOLTS training programme has given female community champions the confidence to claim their rights to land, and male community champions the confidence and understanding to support them. Find links to all three Tanzania blogs here – and look out for the next two blogs in the ‘WOLTS Team Perspectives’ series – coming soon! – as team members from PCC, our WOLTS project partners in Mongolia, describe how their experiences compare.

  • 30 April 2020

Mokoro is excited to co-publish with the Land Portal the third blog in the ‘WOLTS Team Perspectives’ series. This series showcases the views of different members of the global WOLTS team about the impacts of the project’s action-research on gender, land and mining among pastoralist communities in Tanzania and Mongolia. WOLTS Team Perspectives No.3, ‘How Anna Letaiko got her land’, is written by Ezekiel Kereri, who describes in his piece 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. Ezekiel works as Sustainable Livelihoods Program Officer with the Tanzanian NGO, HakiMadini, which has partnered with Mokoro on the WOLTS project since 2016.

 

Read Ezekiel’s blog here, and sign up to keep in touch with WOLTS via our webpage here.

  • 31 March 2020

Mokoro is delighted to publish the second blog in the ‘WOLTS Team Perspectives’ series jointly with the Land Portal. In this series, different members of the global WOLTS team share their views about the impacts of the project’s action-research on gender, land and mining among pastoralist communities in Tanzania and Mongolia. WOLTS Team Perspectives No.2 is written by Emmanuel Mbise and is called: ‘How role-play changed two Maasai communities.’ In his blog, Emmanuel reflects on the power of role-plays about women’s land rights performed by participants in the WOLTS training programme on gender equity. Emmanuel works as Small-Scale Mining Program Officer with the Tanzanian NGO, HakiMadini, which has partnered with Mokoro on the WOLTS project since 2016.

Read Emmanuel’s blog here, and sign up to keep in touch with WOLTS via our webpage here.

  • 17 March 2020

A recent evaluation of the Scaling Up Nutrition Business Network (SBN), conducted by a joint Mokoro and The Partnering Initiative (TPI) team, has been published on the SBN website. The findings and recommendations in the report have been reviewed and endorsed by both GAIN and WFP, who plan to integrate a number of the recommendations into SBN’s new strategy. This will inform and align with the new phase and strategy of the SUN Movement (2021-2025).

Matthew Smith, the team leader for the evaluation, represented Mokoro at the 2019 SUN Movement Global Gathering in Kathmandu, Nepal. He presented the results of the evaluation at the four day event.