From early in my time at boarding school in eSwatini in the 1960s to just a couple of years ago, the BBC World Service was a central part of my life when I was outside the UK. For much of my life, in other words. ...

In 1964, I went with my parents and my brother to live in Lesotho. Since then, there have only been two years when I did not set foot there at all. In quite a few years, I was living and working there. Across all ...

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 ...

There’s no point trying to hide it: I suffer from Ageing Consultant’s Syndrome. The older I get, the more people ask me to work on evaluations, rather than on planning (a forward-looking younger person’s ...

The Kenyan authorities recently calculated that traffic jams in Nairobi cost the economy $600,000 per day. That’s one city I haven’t had the pleasure of visiting recently, but a couple of others have been ...

In probably my shortest field mission so far, I recently spent two nights and three days in Botswana and Zimbabwe, scoping some proposed work on enhancing rural infrastructure. I had at least expected to spend the ...

In January’s newsletter, Mokoro’s Stephen Turner reflected on agricultural extension in Africa. Here Ray Purcell and Martin Adams provide their responses to these articles. If you have any responses to articles ...

I have sometimes been tempted to speculate that if the agricultural extension service in African country x or y were to be closed down overnight, the only people who would notice would be the staff themselves. I ...