Talk by Kunio Okamura, Senior special advisor of JICA

As part of the course on official development assistance, we had a talk by Kunio Okamura.

He started off detailing his career at JICA, from the moment the 'new JICA' was formed in 2008 by combining agencies to 11 months later, when he became the face all over the national news as the new administration of the Democratic Party of Japan targeted existing policies, especially those spending lots of money. We then learned that Japan actually provides a huge amount of aid to developing countries, and that JICA's funds make it bigger than the Asian Development Bank, but slightly smaller than the world bank.

JICA has supported many countries, including Singapore, South Korea and China, which are famous examples of countries that have risen above the developing status. China is now not only the country with the second largest GNP in the world, but is also providing ODA itself. In fact, the so called BRIC countries (Brasil, Russia, India, China) are even discussing about setting up their own development bank in about 2 years.

He also touched on some trends in population and income. Russia is the country with the highest income disparity, with around 146 million inhabitants and 140 billionaires. The population increase in certain countries is slowing down, such as Japan where it has already become negative (-0.1%); whereas Sub-Saharan Africa countries have figures close to the world average of 2.4% (around 2.7%); and in some countries in the Middle East it is as high as 6 or 7%. It is expected that countries such as Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh and Congo, which are now classified as fragile states, will increase in population 25-50%. Another global demographic issue is that more than 50% of all people now live in cities, while 70% of all energy is consumed and 80% of all greenhouse emissions occur in urban areas.

I asked if in his opinion one of the goals of JICA was to make itself unnecessary, or in other words, that JICA aims to provide so much support to develop a country that it would no longer need the assistance of JICA in the future. Aside from the aforementioned success countries, he foresaw a shift of issues JICA or the global society would have to deal with in the near future. The main issue is aging, as after 2030 it is expected that ASEAN countries will all have to deal with this and there is no solution yet. He concluded with the strong wish, that in 30 to 40 years JICA would become unnecessary. Let's hope so.