Section 1 Efforts to Heighten Public Understanding, Support, and Participation

4. JOCV and Senior Volunteers

Programs for the deployment of JOCV and Senior Volunteers count as another JICA-initiated form of participatory aid that involves Japanese nationals in ODA affairs.

Since its establishment in 1965, the JOCV program has placed a cumulative total of 18,853 volunteers on assignments worldwide. As of the end of FY1998, 2,288 JOCVs were assigned to cooperation activities in 59 countries and spanning seven major aid fields, including agriculture, forestry, fisheries, health care, sanitation, education, and culture. The program deploys young Japanese men and women between the ages of 20 and 39 to the developing world to cooperate in social and economic development there as part of the local community. Transferring technology to developing countries, promoting friendly relations and also fostering a broad-ranging international perspective in Japan's young people, it has earned high marks as an undertaking that in the process of national involvement in and greater visibility of Japanese aid. Bolstering measures to assist the employment of returned JOCVs has become a priority issue (Box 4).

Japan launched its Senior Volunteer program in FY1990. This targets Japanese nationals from the age of 40 to 69, with volunteers initially labeled senior cooperation experts. Like the JOCVs, the program recruits and deploys senior citizens interested in taking an active role in development projects in developing countries. As of the end of FY1998, 79 senior volunteers were assigned to cooperation activities in 12 countries for work in eight fields ranging from technology and engineering to agriculture, forestry, and fisheries. A cumulative total of 217 volunteers have been deployed since the program went into effect. Moreover, the number of new assignments covered in the FY1999 budget appropriation has been expanded by 40 persons to a total of 100. Many Japanese in these age groups command a wealth of technical expertise and decades of experience in the business and social dimensions. It is anticipated that demand for their volunteer services will widen in tandem with the increasingly elaborate needs of developing countries in today's world.

The JICA experts to be sent to developing countries have been recruited with the cooperation primarily of the central government and its institutions and local governments. Since FY1997, the government has begun recruiting JICA experts by means of inviting applications from the general public on a trial basis. This new recruitment system affords greater opportunities for participation in Japan's ODA by ordinary citizens who are interested in international cooperation and have the will and ability to contribute to the development of developing countries. It also widens possibilities of meeting requests from developing countries in the fields where the central government finds it difficult to recruit appropriate experts. In FY1998, 37 JICA experts were dispatched based on applications from the general public, and in the FY1999 budget it is expected that the numbers of experts to be dispatched will increase.

Box 4 Returned JOCVs

TOPICS 3. JOCV Participating in Water Resources Development in China

5. Information Disclosure and Development Education

5.1 Information Disclosure

In order to get broad-based public support and understanding of ODA, it is important for the Japanese government to increase its disclosure efforts and to promote accountability. Appropriate public relations efforts both at home and abroad will also be indispensable. In fact, these activities have become even more important now that the country's economic situation is under serious strain.

Most ODA activities are carried out overseas, and as the development agendas of recipient countries diversify, ODA programs too are becoming increasingly broad-ranging, expert and complex. As a result, ordinary Japanese citizens may be having difficulty understanding not only particular ODA projects, but also the overall ODA framework. This problem is not peculiar to Japan, but common to all major aid donor nations. For this very reason, the government has a responsibility to fully inform its people in the clearest possible manner. As one highly effective means to this end, in FY1999, the government introduced an ODA citizen monitoring program which provides the Japanese public with the chance to visit ODA sites firsthand. This year, the program was used to recruit 47 monitors (one from each prefecture) and send them overseas to developing countries to observe Japanese ODA projects and talk with staff and locals. (Monitors were sent to six countries in Asia for this purpose in FY1999.) Monitors' findings will be compiled in a report and its recommendations will duly be examined to achieve further improvement of ODA.⁹

Among its undertakings in ODA-related disclosure and public relations oriented toward the Japanese public, the government has for some years issued a variety of publications (see Box 5). Also, to celebrate International Cooperation Day, it holds the International Cooperation Festival and other PR events which invite broad public participation and allow the public to experience firsthand the ODA relations between Japan and developing countries. October 6 was designated International Cooperation Day in 1987, and every year on or near that date, commemorative events are held in communities nationwide.¹⁰

In addition, the Plaza for International Cooperation was set up to provide an ODA information center for the public. The Plaza collects and creates public data and reference materials and provides a forum for the exchange of ODA information and ideas among NGOs. Recently it has become a popular spot for school field trips and other excursions by Japanese children. It is currently working to expand its local network outside the Tokyo area, with 29 Plaza for International Cooperation Corners now established nationwide to disseminate ODA-related information to mass media organizations and citizens at the local community level.¹¹

MoFA has actively enlisted its web site¹² as a useful ODA information resource. As of 1997, visitors to the page have had access to both parts of Japan's ODA Annual Report and abridged versions of the Annual Evaluation Report on Japan's Economic Cooperation. The site has been further enhanced with a multimedia "ODA Virtual Tour" that offers visitors the chance to experience a simulated project inspection tour complete with video and sound clips. The site recorded more than 220,000 hits in FY1998, numbering it among the most frequently visited sites on the MoFA home page.

ODA-related PR efforts are no less important abroad than at home. Japan's ODA activities form a bridge between Japan and developing countries, and are funded from sources such as the public's taxes and postal savings. Moreover, Japanese citizens are directly involved in technical cooperation and the many other forms of ODA provided. For these reasons, sufficient recognition and appreciation of Japanese ODA projects by the recipient countries are prerequisite to the goal of gaining the understanding and support of the Japanese public. The overseas offices of diplomatic missions, JICA, and the JBIC are mindful to adequately utilize signing and inauguration ceremonies of the ODA projects for public relations purposes. Overseas diplomatic representatives are engaged in a variety of public relations activities concerning information to heighten bilateral exchange and the contributions of ODA in the respective recipient countries, including the regular distribution of pamphlets in the local language and the dissemination of related information through Internet web sites. Economic cooperation project inspection tours are yet another endeavor, and are designed to offer government and media representatives from developing countries an opportunity to visit and inspect aid project sites carried out through Japanese ODA. English versions, and in some cases French and Spanish versions, of the ODA Annual Report, the Annual Evaluation Report on Japan's Economic Cooperation, and various ODA-related pamphlets are also created, and the English version of MoFA's home page provides a wide variety of information on Japan's basic ODA policy, including abridged versions of the ODA Annual Report and the Annual Evaluation Report.

Japanese aid supplies and equipment at project sites, including materials for emergency relief purposes, bear Japan's official ODA insignia (as printed on the front and back covers of this document) to let people know at a glance that they were furnished by Japanese ODA.

5.2 Development Education

To foster better public awareness and understanding of the issues that developing countries are facing and thereby to earn public acceptance of the value of aid, the Japanese education system must accurately portray ODA's significance and current realities in the developmental assistance field.

In a March 1997 report concerned with administrative supervision, the Administrative Management and Coordination Agency concluded that school textbooks used in Japanese junior and senior high schools do not yet present an accurate picture of ODA. Citing examples of "clearly inaccurate information" and "passages where recent trends have not been taken into account in descriptions of situations and criticisms of the past," the report recommended that MoFA make further public relations efforts. MoFA, JICA, and the JBIC are striving to resolve these misunderstandings and to better inform students and the general public about ODA realities through efforts directed at school textbook authors, teachers, students, and other interested parties. For example, they have been mailing copies of Japan's ODA Annual Report to school textbook writers, conducting community-level development education seminars, and supplying schools with instructional materials and PR-oriented videos. Thanks in part to these efforts, high school textbooks now feature fewer of the objectionable passages pointed out by the administrative supervision report. Further, in FY1998, an ODA development education teaching package was created for junior high schools, comprising a video and a teacher's manual, with this package distributed to 3,000 junior high schools around Japan. Surveys on the utilization of and response to the package revealed that teachers found the materials highly effective.¹³ Lectures and ODA "teach-ins"¹⁴ with panel discussions are another way in which the ODA message is being brought to Japan's universities.

Box 5 ODA-Related Publications

TOPICS 4. ODA Citizen-Monitors (Monitoring Group of Private Citizens on Japan's Official Development Assistance)

6. Cultivation of Human Resources for Development Assistance

Aid is implemented by people, and having access to and utilizing pools of highly qualified aid personnel is vital to the pursuit of more efficient aid. Japan needs to train highly skilled and highly knowledgeable experts for each area and field and imbue in them a strongly international perspective. Furthermore, close ties between educational institutions and those implementing agencies and aid personnel active in the field should open the way for more realistic personnel training programs.

The Foundation for Advanced Studies on International Development (FASID) was established in 1990 as the seminal outgrowth of a plan advocated in 1985 for the creation of an "international development university"¹⁵ as a means of fostering development cooperation professionals with both theoretical and practical knowledge. FASID organizes development assistance training, dispatches researchers overseas, organizes international symposiums, collects and stores information, and conducts studies and research related to development assistance, as well as other forms of university-level education and research related to ODA.

FASID epitomizes the move to train future aid professionals which has arisen from the globalization of the 1990s, and several university graduate schools in Japan now also offer courses in development assistance. FASID provides support for the development assistance education of these universities, helping the International University of Japan and Hiroshima University put together their development education curriculums,¹⁶ and providing instructors for the development assistance-related courses offered by Saitama University and Nagoya University.¹⁷ Also, backed by the initiative of the Japanese government, several research and training institutions worldwide are now pursuing collaborative research with the goal of forming interconnecting networks and building a system for the cultivation of shared research personnel resources.

It is important that public and private sector human resources involved in ODA activities continue to refine their skills and acquire a broader, enriched international outlook. This perspective was behind the establishment of a government foreign study program with ODA budget financing to foster and build the capacities of ODA personnel. However, it has been pointed out that not every central government employee who completes study under the program is actually assigned to an ODA-related post. The government has therefore decided to do more to ensure that such personnel are given opportunities to play ODA-related roles after they return from their studies abroad, and put their new skills to more effective use.

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