Mokoro : Key Topics
Within our areas of expertise, Mokoro consultants work on a variety of topics. Here is a selection of our current key topics, which constitute critical development issues that development actors (from governments to aid agencies to civil society) are grappling with today.
Agricultural Development
Agriculture remains essential to poverty reduction and the achievement of the MDGs in many countries of the world. It is a major source of productive employment for rural people worldwide, whether as small-scale farmers or through working for large-scale farmers or agricultural enterprises. Effective use of rural and urban land resources to grow enough food to support the world’s still-growing population is vital to global food security. Developing appropriate modalities for the delivery of public and private sector services and developing good practice models of investment in agriculture are essential to ensuring that agricultural development takes place in ways that are just and balanced. Agricultural development which supports the livelihoods of small-scale farmers while enabling the improvements in productivity needed to increase overall output is an important part of this, as is ensuring ‘decent work’ for those working for large-scale farmers and agricultural enterprises.
Mokoro consultants have extensive and wide-ranging long-term experience in the global agricultural sector. They have worked on a variety of projects and policy-related assignments since the company was founded, addressing all aspects of rural livelihoods and agricultural development and investment. Mokoro’s Ray Purcell led a project to establish a new National Agricultural Advisory Service in Romania, and was an Agri-business Specialist on an Identification and Formulation Mission in Kosovo in 2007. In 2010, he led an evaluation of an Irish Aid Agricultural Research Project in Ethiopia, and in 2011, a team looking at livelihoods for excluded groups in the Somali Region of Ethiopia for DFID. In 2011, Mokoro’s Elizabeth Daley led field teams researching good practices in agricultural investments from a gender and social equity perspective in Tanzania and in Laos.
Aid Predictability
Aid is predictable when partner countries can be confident about the amount and timing of aid disbursements (OECD DAC). It depends on both how transparent aid is and how reliable it is i.e. whether commitments are translated into actual flows (which relates to the existence of clear shared rules governing aid disbursements). Unpredictability is rife across donors and countries. This costs money and constrains results; it devalues aid through a negative impact on growth, public financial management, and development outcomes, including the Millennium Development Goals.
Mokoro has experience of assessing predictability in its extensive aid effectiveness work. Currently Mokoro is undertaking a study of aid predictability for the DAC Working Party on Aid Effectiveness (Task Team on Transparency and Predictability) to inform discussions at the 2011 Busan High Level Forum. The study takesstock of progress in meeting commitments on aid predictability, identifies institutional impediments for donors and partner countries, and highlights good practices. The Mokoro team is led by Stephen Lister and includes Liv Bjørnestad, Rebecca Carter and Mailan Chiche.
Decentralisation
The debate on whether decentralisation is a good thing for development and poverty reduction may well never be authoritatively concluded. It may also not be the right question: most often decentralisation is a response to country-specific political imperatives. Similarly, it should not be taken for granted that decentralisation goes along with democratisation. In all contexts, the response to these questions depends on the country-specific political economy of decentralisation (Eaton, Kaiser and Smoke, 2010 The Political Economy of Decentralization Reforms Implications and Aid Effectiveness, World Bank). What is clear is that a decentralising context changes the landscape in which sector policies are planned, budgeted and implemented. This raises the challenge of strengthening systems at sub-national government levels and, for donors, of designing aid instruments that are well adapted to the country-specific shape of decentralisation.
Mokoro has worked on sector and public finance management (PFM) reforms and aid effectiveness issues in various decentralising contexts. For example, Mokoro has been influential at several stages in the development of the Ethiopian Protecting Basic Services programme, widely seen as a successful model of ‘decentralised budget support’. Mokoro’s Catherine Dom is now involved in the design of aid instruments adapted to decentralised service delivery in South Sudan and in supporting the rollout of the PFM reform at provincial and sub-provincial levels in the DRC. Mokoro has been involved in assessing grant systems and sub-national planning and budgeting systems in Vietnam and Cambodia and in broader studies of decentralisation including in Uganda and Ethiopia. Our decentralisation team includes Catherine Dom and Stephen Lister and a number of Mokoro Associates.
Education
From both instrumental and rights-based perspectives, education has featured strongly in successive development paradigms - as illustrated by the education goals regularly set by the international community. Education has often been one of the first sectors supported by ‘new aid modalities’ and instruments (including sector-wide approaches and general and sector budget support). Indeed the equitable provision of quality education depends on the effectiveness of broader government systems and other sector policies. The challenges that this raises are all the more acute in fragile and post-conflict contexts, as well documented in the 2011 Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report. In contrast with health, there have been few innovations in relation to international funding for education - apart from the EFA Fast Track Initiative (FTI).
Mokoro has worked on the links between education and broader government systems and other sector policies at both international and country levels. In 2011 Mokoro provided the team leader and several members of the FTI mid-term evaluation. In 2011 Mokoro undertook an evaluation of the effectiveness of the World Food Programme’s school feeding policy and programmes worldwide. We have worked in a range of countries (from near-middle income to post-conflict contexts) on developing education financing frameworks, strengthening public financial management and decentralisation systems in relation to education, and designing system-aligned aid instruments to support education. Our education team includes Stephen Lister (who led the FTI and WFP evaluations), Alta Fölscher, Anthea Gordon and Catherine Dom, as well as a number of Associates.
Food Security
Food security remains an elusive goal for many of the world’s poor, despite the recognition of the right to adequate food in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Governments are often concerned with national food security, which they may confuse with food self-sufficiency and the notion that a country should be able to produce all the food it needs within its own borders. Food security is not just about agricultural development, and it is necessary for rapidly swelling urban populations just as much as for the rural poor. In 1996, the World Food Summit defined food security as when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. This means that food must be available, and that people must have access to it.
Mokoro consultants have worked with governments and NGOs in many countries to address the agricultural, economic and social dimensions of the food security challenge, at policy and practical levels. For example, Mokoro’s Stephen Turner was the food security adviser to the DFID-funded Priority Support Programme in Lesotho from 2006 to 2009, while Stephen Lister led the evaluation of the World Food Programme’s school feeding policy in 2011 with inputs from Anthea Gordon, Stephen Turner and a number of Mokoro Associates. In Ethiopia, Catherine Dom and Alula Pankhurst have supported the design of the second phase of the government’s major food security programme developing from the narrower understanding of food security in the first phase (2009), to a focus on evaluating food security research and capacity building programmes (2010).
Fragility and Development
The importance of understanding a country’s specific fragility to help its trajectory towards resilience and sustainable development possible is increasingly recognised. In recent years donors have increased resource flows to fragile areas (though skewed towards a few of these countries) and the promise of more. There is also a growing appreciation that engagement in such countries needs to be carefully tailored to their context. However, vastly more work is needed on how to make aid more effective in fragile contexts to move from rhetoric to results. In the same vein, a recent study by the World Bank stated that “fragile states emerging from conflict can make substantial and relatively rapid progress in reforming PFM systems” (Fritz, Hedger and Fialho Lopes, 2011, Public Financial Management Reform in Post-Conflict Countries, World Bank). This too requires context-specific approaches fully recognising that the inherited and path-dependent institutional context, however dysfunctional, has to be the starting point.
Mokoro consultants’ experience in fragile situations includes work in: Afghanistan, Burundi, Cambodia, the DRC, Mozambique, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestine/West Bank and Gaza, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Sudan and Zimbabwe. For example, Catherine Dom has been involved in work looking at how to make aid work better ’on the ground’ in fragile contexts through contributing to the Budget Strengthening Initiative (BSI) of the Overseas Development Institute in the design of service delivery support aid instruments in South Sudan, and as BSI team leader in DRC focusing on supporting the government public financial management reform programme at strategic and operational levels. In 2011 Catherine Dom and Anthea Gordon carried out a study for Oxfam of the use of budget support in fragile states. Mokoro recently held a seminar entitled "Pathways out of Conflict and Fragility " which brought together for the first time authors from the 2011 Education For All Global Monitoring Report and the 2011 World Development Report.
Gender and Land
Gender relations are an important foundation to understanding all aspects of land relations. Issues of gender equity underpin responsible governance of land tenure and arise within the full range of land projects - in land policy and reform, land administration, land registration, land use (spatial) planning and so on. Women’s land rights are an issue of special concern. In many countries women’s access to and rights to use, own and control land and natural resources have been constrained by gendered social and cultural norms that discriminate against them. This is slowly changing as reforms address issues of discrimination and equity, but implementing change remains a major issue on the ground.
Gender issues are integral to all Mokoro’s work on tenure rights and access to land and natural resources and we have substantive expertise on all issues relating to gender and land. Recent Mokoro assignments on gender and land include production of a comprehensive research paper and policy brief on Gendered Impacts of Commercial Pressures on Land for the International Land Coalition (by Elizabeth Daley) (see here and here). Elizabeth Daley has also been leading the preparation of a technical guide on Governing Land for Women and Men for the FAO, as part of the process of developing Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries, and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (see FAO land tenure guides). This assignment included the organization of a successful workshop at FAO in Rome in May 2011 attended by land sector practitioners and stakeholders from governments, civil society and the private sector from across the globe. Mokoro’s Robin Palmer established the Oxfam ’women’s land rights listserv’ which is widely subscribed to by people working in this field (Women’s Land Rights Liserv, now run by M. Wegerif). Both Robin and Elizabeth Daley are also widely published on issues around gender and land.
Governance
Donors recognise that ’governance matters’ but there is no consensus about what constitutes ’good governance’. There is increasing recognition that one needs to be pragmatic about making governance work for development, leading to discussion of concepts like ’good enough governance’ (Grindle, 2002, Good Enough Governance: Poverty Reduction and Reform in Developing Countries, Harvard University) and ideas of context-specific ’best fit’ institutions and ’working with the grain’ (Kelsall, 2010, Going with the Grain in African Development? Development Policy Review Volume 29). In the same vein the 2011 World Development Report stresses that in post-conflict contexts donors ought to support ’inclusive enough’ rather than (’gold standard’ but unrealistic) all-embracing political settlement processes. Interest is also rising for governance work focusing on particular sectors. A consensus is emerging about the need to develop mid-range theories of change which can explain what types of governance interventions are likely to work in different subsets of contexts, recognizing that governance is not about government only.
Much of Mokoro’s work has involved contributions to rule creation and maintenance, and governance has been a key issue in many of the evaluations we have undertaken. In 2011 Pip Bevan, Rebecca Carter, Catherine Dom and Alula Pankhurst are involved in longitudinal research in Ethiopia exploring the extent to which differences between and within villages are associated with differences in the substance and governance approach of development interventions. Alta Fölscher has worked on issues of civil society and accountability for many years; for example, providing inputs on budget reform and accountability to civil society as part of a course on public finance management and public expenditure analysis for DFID and other donor staff based in Addis Ababa and the region.
Resettlement
Citizens the world over regularly lose land and property to infrastructure development projects, or may even see their homes demolished to make way for roads, airports, stadiums or reservoirs. In richer countries, while such schemes may be bitterly contested, they take place in a strict legal framework of public acquisition and compensation. In other nations, infrastructure development has often been accompanied by massive social injustice as the poor are forced to make way for modernisation, losing land, livelihoods and often their homes in the process. Over recent decades, international efforts have been made to ensure due process and adequate compensation whenever such developments affect people’s property and lives. Involuntary displacement and resettlement are now interpreted broadly, covering loss and restoration of productive assets as well as homes. They take into account the intangible but very real social and cultural losses that the affected people suffer, as well as the impacts on host populations of the arrival of resettled people among them. Policy aims to achieve just and effective compensation, which may be material, financial or both. A common principle is that the lives of those affected should be maintained at a standard at least equal to that before the time of the disturbance. To achieve this in practice means aiming higher, and striving to make affected people the primary beneficiaries of any infrastructure development, rather than the marginalised victims.
Emphasising the principle of combining resettlement with development, Mokoro consultants have built extensive experience with the design, monitoring and evaluation of resettlement programmes, for example, Stephen Turner has worked on the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, the Komati River Basin Project (Swaziland) and the Lower Usuthu Smallholder Irrigation Project (Swaziland).
Social Protection
From earlier emphasis on infrastructural and economic development and thanks to evolving understanding of the opportunities and constraints inherent in the livelihoods of the poor, development thinking and practice on social protection have expanded. There has been a growing focus on the design and delivery of social protection. These measures to help the poor, the weak and the marginalised range from indigenous cultural practices of sharing and support, through life-cycle measures such as child support allowances and old age pensions, to special assistance for the chronically ill, the destitute or those affected by emergencies. Increasingly, it is recognised that social transfers can be an engine of growth. Dependency arguments are convincingly rebuffed by evidence that most beneficiaries of social protection use the resources they receive in prudent and often productive ways, sometimes using them as a foundation for new income generation and usually stimulating the local economy through the additional consumption that such transfers permit.
Mokoro consultants have engaged with many aspects of this dynamic field: researching social protection options and impacts, supporting policy development and monitoring social protection practice. They offer applied research capacity; policy and programme insights; and the ability to assess the progress of social protection programmes at local and national scale. In 2010 Stephen Turner supported co-ordination of a social development policy framework for Botswana (2010). In 2011 Alula Pankhurst prepared an empirical research-based policy paper on differentiated effects of development interventions on different people and groups in rural villages in Ethiopia; Also in 2011, Stephen Lister (with inputs from Anthea Gordon and Mokoro Associates) led an evaluation of the World Food Programme’s school feeding policy in the context of that organisation’s shift from a ’food aid’ to ’food assistance’ commitment to food security.
Tenure, Rights and Access (TRA) to land and natural resources
Potentially, TRA is as broad as the scope and content of much of the rural livelihoods work undertaken by Mokoro. It encompasses the technical aspects of land administration; advice to governments on the strengthening of customary land rights and the tenure of vulnerable groups; assisting with the more political aspects of water rights and forest tenure reform; and land-use conflicts that affect economic access to resources by legitimate rights holders, men and women. Progress in all of these TRA areas is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for sustainable social and economic development and the sustainable utilisation of natural resources. TRA activities link with other activities to create the necessary and sufficient conditions for achieving the goal of sustainable development.
TRA issues are also closely linked to governance. Land and other natural resources have value other than as a source of vital food security and welfare. For example, land is valued as a contribution to social prestige or political power, as a hedge against inflation, or as a speculative asset. In a market economy, these other benefits are especially sought by the wealthy and can provide strong reasons for holding on to land, to the exclusion of the poor. States are required to underwrite security of tenure for all citizens by providing the legal and institutional capacity needed for just, equitable and efficient administration of all natural resources, where necessary intervening in the market for redistributive reform. States must also provide the means to reinstate tenure, rights and access to affected citizens in the event of conflicts or natural disasters. If quality of governance falls below a certain threshold, then assured, effective economic access of poor people to land and other natural resources is unlikely.
Mokoro consultants and associates have substantive experience of working across the whole range of TRA issues, through our work on land rights, land and water tenure, gender and land, resettlement and natural resource management, among others. Most recently, Mokoro’s Martin Adams was the Team Leader of the global evaluation of FAO’s support to Tenure, Rights and Access to Land and Natural Resources in 2011.
Women’s Economic Empowerment
Women’s economic empowerment is called for by MDGs 1 and 3 - Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, and Promote gender equality and empower women. Working towards women’s economic empowerment is about supporting women to gain the benefits of their participation in the economy. This means recognizing their unpaid and ’reproductive’ work as well as improving the rewards of their paid ’productive’ work and ensuring that the work is ’decent’. It also means paying attention to policies - and their implementation - around women’s property rights, access to financial services and credit, access to agricultural inputs and resources, labour market and working conditions, access to reproductive health care and child care, access to justice, and women and girls’ education. It is thus broadly all-encompassing and requires the full range of socio-economic circumstances and socio-cultural norms that disadvantage or discriminate against women to be addressed.
Mokoro’s consultants have between them a wide range of skills and experiences to support different aspects of work towards women’s economic empowerment. We are particularly strong on issues relating to women’s property rights, food security, and education. Mokoro’s Elizabeth Daley contributed to a Gender Growth Assessment for the International Finance Corporation in Rwanda in 2008, and in 2011 led field teams researching the gender and equity implications of land-related investments on labour and income-generating opportunities in Tanzania for the FAO. She also participated in a DFID Roundtable on Women’s Economic Empowerment in London in December 2010.