Japan's Official Development Assistance White Paper 2010
3. Strengthening the Functions at the Field Level
In order to strengthen the field capacity, Country-based ODA Task Forces (ODA-TFs) — consisting of Japanese embassies and field offices of JICA and other agencies — have been established in various countries since 2003.
ODA-TFs gauge the assistance needs of developing countries, and are involved in formulating CAPs which indicate such items as the direction and priority areas of Japanese assistance, facilitating policy consultations with the counterpart government, and cooperating with other donors and aid agencies and international organizations. They also make recommendations on the coordination and review of aid schemes and candidate projects and have a wide-ranging role. For example, with respect to facilitating coordination with other donors, aid agencies, and international organizations, ODA-TFs actively participate in the discussions on the formulation and revision of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) and sectoral programs, which are conducted in cooperation with donors and other stakeholders under the ownership of developing country governments. Although ODA-TFs grasp the development needs and coordinate with the local aid community and other stakeholders, such as local Japanese businesses and NGOs, their activity levels vary amongst them and they do not sufficiently share their expertise, experiences, and good practices with each other.
Implementing effective ODA requires strengthening field capacities to be able to promptly grasp the needs of the partner country and hold dialogues with the partner country government or other donors and aid agencies. Hence, Japan’s ODA Charter and Medium-Term Policy on ODA set out a policy to strengthen field capacities.
In order to ensure that ODA-TFs are able to fully fulfill their roles, Japan is strengthening its human resources capacity and assisting with the sharing of information and expertise. In terms of human resources, Japan has to date dispatched Coordinators for Economic Cooperation to nine Japanese embassies in Africa to handle aid coordination. Through such processes, Japan has taken steps to collect information and research about aid coordination, promote the outward communication of Japan’s policies, and make recommendations. In addition, in the area of information and expertise sharing, in order to collect and analyze information on the partner country’s macro economy or the overall economic picture and the country’s national development plan, Japan commissions a local university or research institute to carry out a study and makes use of the study results in implementing assistance. Furthermore, Japan sets up workshop opportunities to introduce Japan’s aid policy and to exchange opinions with counterpart governments and aid practitioners.
The “ODA Review” presented a number of ways for making the most use of the field information and for taking stock of this information to improve the implementation of projects, including: (1) strengthening the aid coordination mechanism by expanding the number of Coordinators for Economic Cooperation; (2) enhancing dialogue and information gathering by holding workshops more frequently between ODA-TFs and field offices of Japanese companies and NGOs; and (3) promoting information and expertise sharing among ODA-TFs by region and issue through the establishment of an information sharing forum among the ODA-TFs in the region or neighboring countries (through the strengthening of such horizontal coordination, good practices and expertise will be shared and used in a timely manner). Going forward, Japan will advance efforts to make sure that the above measures are implemented.