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

The ‘WOLTS Team Perspectives’ series of blogs was launched in February, receiving a great response online. The series comprises the following blogs from different WOLTS team members: ‘Seats of power – women’s land rights and chairs’ by Joyce Ndakaru; ‘How role-play changed two Maasai communities’ by Emmanuel Mbise; How Anna Letaiko got her land’ by Ezekiel Kereri; ‘Young WOLTS champions offer hope for Mongolia’s herding future’ by Suvd Boldbaatar; and ‘How Covid-19 is bringing Mongolia’s herding families back together’ by B. Munkhtuvshin. Read more.

Mokoro Principal Consultant, Stephen Turner, has written a thought-provoking piece reflecting on 2020 and the ways geography has changed, and ways in which its meaning has deepened. He reflects that although operating remotely through 2020 really has shown that, although there are parts of our work where we can park the realities of geography and perform tasks quite well from home, returning to direct, face-to-face engagement with the people, the countries, the concerns that we care about is very important. Read more.

In this article, Mokoro Principal Consultant, Stephen Lister, uncovers the commentovirus pandemic, which infects evaluations at the stage when evaluators submit a draft report for review. The common symptoms of this virus are twofold: in evaluation managers it manifests as commentosis – the production of a excessive number of comments (albeit most of them very superficial) which triggers commentitis (an inflammation to which evaluators succumb as result of an excess viral load of comments). Read more.

Robin Palmer and Catherine Dom have both written reviews of Land to the Tiller: an interview with Zegeye Asfaw by Ann Oosthuizen. This is a fascinating interview with Zegeye Asfaw from 2012, telling the story of his life, the struggle for land reform in Ethiopia, and the personal cost of that struggle for himself and others. Read Catherine's review. Read Robin's review.