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New JICA to start operations next month
Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the Overseas Economic Cooperation Operations (OECOs) of Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) will be merged to form the “New JICA” on October 1, 2008 in the context of recent Japanese administrative reform.
For the first time, one Japanese aid agency will be able to provide three schemes of Japanese ODA “all under one roof”.
Those schemes are technical assistance that JICA extends by dispatching experts and volunteers, acceptance of trainees, development studies, technical cooperation projects, grass-roots technical assistance; ODA loans that JBIC provides as Overseas Economic Cooperation Operations; and some grants from the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
New JICA will thus provide comprehensive assistance that most effectively addresses the needs of developing countries from large-scale infrastructure construction to technical cooperation at the grass-roots level.
New JICA will work on the principle of the three S’s: speed up, scale up and spread out: speeding up projects by closer coordination of technical assistance, loans, and grant aid, scaling up successful pilot projects to larger programmes and spreading out by enlarging community-based activities and combining grass-roots cooperation with NGOs, volunteers, experts and private organisations.
The agency, with some 10 billion dollars of available financial resources, a staff of more than 1,600 and several thousand experts and consultants and both young and senior volunteers working on hundreds of projects, will reputedly be the world’s largest bilateral development organisation working in around 150 countries.
“When we combine our resources – technical assistance, soft loans and grant aid – the impact could be huge. We are also combining the talents of so many people in different fields. This will create a new synergy, a new chemistry for JICA,” said JICA President Sadako Ogata.
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