On Friday 10 March Mokoro held a very well attended seminar ‘Land advocacy in Africa: past, present and future’. The seminar brought together speakers who have engaged on land advocacy in Africa in recent years and looked at what lessons have been learned and at how best to respond to the current threats to Africa of the global land grab. Martin Adams (Mokoro) presented on ‘‘Land reform in Southern Africa: What has changed?’.  Martin reflected on an important part of his vast experience of working on land, in this instance of working within the ministries of both governments committed to pro-poor land reform and of governments which were not. Chris Tanner (Mokoro) spoke about ‘Struggling to implement a progressive 1997 land law in Mozambique’. He reflected on his 11 years of work with FAO in Mozambique on legal empowerment and access to justice, including paralegal courses, seminars for local government officials, gender issues etc. William Beinart (African Studies Centre, University of Oxford) talked about his recent experiences acting as an expert witness in land restitution cases in South Africa. William’s presentation dealt with the complexities of restitution, the lack of clarity in the legal status of land rights for those who live in the former homelands of South Africa and some recent ideas about how those rights can be made more secure. Finally, Rachel Ibreck (Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Goldsmiths, University of London) presented ‘Reflections on the significance of customary authority and local patronage politics for land grab advocacy in Africa.’

To celebrate International Women’s Day, Mokoro is pleased to share news of the successful completion of fieldwork in the fourth of six phases of our WOLTS pilot study in both Mongolia and Tanzania. The WOLTS team is well underway with preparing two major reports of our findings, to be launched, respectively, in May and June this year. In the meantime, do come and visit our poster presentation at the World Bank’s Land and Poverty Conference in Washington on Wednesday 22 March to learn more about our work. Please also sign up to keep in touch via our website. Happy International Women’s Day to you all!

The final report of the WFP Sri Lanka Country Portfolio Evaluation (CPE) 2011-2015, led by Mokoro, has been published. The Mokoro team was led by Stephen Lister.

The country portfolio evaluation for Sri Lanka covered all WFP operations from 2011 to 2015. It assessed WFP’s alignment and strategic positioning, the factors and quality of its strategic decision-making, and the performance and the results of the portfolio activities as a whole.

The evaluation makes six recommendations, most of which need to be implemented in collaboration with the Government and/or other international agencies. These include: i) working with the Government to identify “upstream” areas where WFP can add the most value in the future, while agreeing a phased hand-over to the Government of direct service delivery, notably school feeding; ii) encouraging all United Nations agencies to coordinate and streamline their activities in line with Sri Lanka’s new circumstances; iii) working with government and other agencies to develop an adequately resourced plan for completing the resettlement of displaced persons; iv) continuing to offer specialist support to multi sector nutrition approaches; v) hand-over of the school meals programme and vi) strengthening the cost analysis linked to modality choice and assigning higher priority to assessing the performance of cash-based transfers.

The final report and management response can be found on the WFP website. Read more about the project and the Mokoro team.

The draft final report of the Performance Review of the 11^th European Development Fund (EDF) has been published on the European Commission’s (EC) website for a 12-week Open Public Consultation (OPC) period. The OPC is an opportunity for stakeholders in beneficiary and EU countries to provide feedback on the findings and conclusions from the evaluation. The EDF evaluation is one of nine evaluations taking place in parallel of the suite of EC’s External Financing Instruments (EFI) which are in operation under the EU’s current Multiannual Financing Framework (2014-2020). While the EDF sits outside this framework as it is not funded from the EU budget, it covers the same programming period and has therefore been included in the same evaluation and consultation process. A further reason for this consultation is therefore to gather preliminary ideas for the next generation of EFIs.

The evaluation of the EDF is being undertaken by a DAI-led consortium with Mokoro as the technical lead. Mokoro consultants involved are Muriel Visser (Team Leader), Karolyn Thunnissen, Stephen Lister, Matthew Smith and Fran Girling. The evaluation has involved documentation review, extensive interviews, data analysis, eight country case studies as well as the preparation of three reports (inception report, desk report and draft final report). Following the OPC and the translation of submitted feedback, the final evaluation report will be prepared for completion in Summer 2017.

The period of consultation is 7 February – 3 May 2017. Go to the reports

Ethiopia WIDE is a longitudinal qualitative research programme tracking long-term development trajectories as experienced by rural communities in a fast-evolving wider context, in which government policies and programmes matter. Following a recent round of fieldwork, the research team has produced a book which is due to be launched on 2 February in Addis Ababa. Drawing on a number of discussion papers earlier discussed with the government, the book suggests that these communities have changed beyond belief over the past twenty years, and highlights a number of crosscutting themes arising from the research. The WIDE team are very pleased to have close support from high-ranking officials in government, including in the office of the Prime Minister, and hope to gradually institutionalise the WIDE approach. To read more about the WIDE research, see the EthiopiaWIDE website and also an article on our recent WIDE seminar.

Mokoro’s WOLTS Project – our multi-country action-oriented strategic research project in support of women’s land rights – has now completed all our pilot study’s Phase 3 baseline survey fieldwork. A team from our Tanzanian NGO partners, Haki Madini, conducted the survey between August and October in Tanzania, following our Mongolian NGO partners, PCC, who conducted the survey in July and August in Mongolia. The baseline fieldwork was carried out in two pastoralist communities in each country where land rights and livelihoods are being affected by mining investments. Read more about WOLTS here.

The EthiopiaWIDE team held a series of public events on November 1st and 2nd in Oxford and London, including a Mokoro seminar ‘Tracking rural communities since 1994 – evidence from EthiopiaWIDE’. The other events were held at the Oxford University African Studies Centre and ODI. The presentations have been published on the EthiopiaWIDE website and are available to download here. Read also Mokoro article on the recent WIDE seminar.

LEGEND is a DFID programme that aims to improve land rights protection, knowledge and information, and the quality of private sector investment in DFID priority countries. Through the programme  a series of short evidence updates are being produced, summarising emerging bodies of evidence from different sources on key themes related to land governance or particular country issues. Mokoro’s Dr Elizabeth Daley and Kristina Lanz have recently produced an evidence update titled ‘Gender, land and agricultural development in Africa. From women to gender’. The brief is now available to download through the Mokoro led Land Rights in Africa website.

Mokoro recently completed an evaluation of Finland’s Development Cooperation Country Strategies and Country Strategy Modality. This evaluation, the largest in Mokoro’s history, was carried out in partnership with Indufor on behalf of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland. The purpose of the evaluation was to provide evidence-based information and practical guidance for the next phase of the Country Strategy Modality. This included how to improve results-based management in country programming for management, learning and accountability purposes; and how to improve the quality of implementation of Finnish development policy at the partner country level. As such, comprehensive country strategy evaluations took place in Ethiopia, Mozambique, Nepal, Tanzania, Vietnam and Zambia. The six country country reports and the overall evaluation synthesis report are now available for download from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland website.

Mokoro’s WOLTS Project – our multi-country action-oriented strategic research project in support of women’s land rights – has just completed fieldwork to carry out a baseline survey in our first pilot country, Mongolia. During August, a team from our NGO partners, People Centered Conservation, conducted the survey with members of pastoralist communities whose land rights and livelihoods are being affected by mining investments. We are now underway with analysing the data and starting to prepare for our participatory fieldwork phase in Mongolia. Read more about WOLTS here.