TICAD: The Context of Japan’s Development Aids to Africa

Abstract

Most of the discourse on development aid in Africa has been limited to assistance from Western countries and those provided by competing capitalist and socialist blocs during the Cold war era. Japan, a nation with great economic and military capabilities; its development assistance for Africa is encapsulated in the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) initiative. The TICAD started in 1993 and Japan has so far held 5 TICAD meetings between 1993 and 2013 during which Africa’s development challenges and Japan’s development assistance to the continent were discussed. The emphasis on “ownership”, “self-help” and “partnership” are major peculiar characteristics of Japan’s development aid that puts the design, implementation and control of development projects under the control of recipient countries. This is a major departure from the usual practice in international development assistance where recipient countries are bound by clauses that somewhat puts the control of development aid in the hands of the granting countries. Such binding clauses have often been described as inimical to the successful administration of the aids and development in recipient countries. Though Japan’s development aid to Africa started only in 1993, by the 2000s, Japan was the topmost donor to Africa. This paper examines the context of Japan’s development aid to Africa by analyzing secondary data sourced from literature and secondary statistics.

Technical and Vocational Education and Training toward Sustainable Development of Japan’s Aid Effectiveness for Industrial Human Resource Development in Lower Mekong Basin Countries

“…For instance, Japan's ownership in Africa. Japan has presented a unique ownership representation of self-help and partnership, portraying the negotiation space as contributing to a 'trusted intermediary' [16]; as a result, the ownership in the prevalent humdrum is to empower equal leadership in managing aid programs. Referring to the introduction above, this article examines the practice of Japan's ODA under KOSEN in LMB.…”