DEVELOPMENT-JAPAN: Humanitarian Aid Policy Under Question

By Suvendrini Kakuchi Reprint | | Print |

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Mar 23 1999 (IPS) - Japan may be the world’s top donor nation, but development experts say the effectiveness of its grant and humanitarian assistance programmes needs to be improved.

According to experts here, too much of Japan’s generosity — which runs into billions of dollars — is going to the “hardware” portion of projects supported by grant assistance, at the cost of leaving out the “software” aspects that in most cases are even more imperative to the success of humanitarian projects.

“For example,” says Mansoor Ahmed, head of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Japan, “Japanese grants to child health involves excessive spending on the supply and equipment side such as hospitals, medicine, vaccinations.

“This policy does not always bring the best results,” he says, “for it ignores the need to direct money into channels such as training, and other support mechanisms that are implementing these programmes.”

Other humanitarian agencies also say Japan should channel more aid into sanitation, education and water supply projects in recipient nations. By doing this, they say, Tokyo will be enhancing the effectiveness of its aid through broader participation.

The criticisms come at the eve of Japan’s aid pledge for the new fiscal year that begins in April. Japan is expected to announce an official development assistance (ODA) budget of 1.045 trillion yen (8.84 billion dollars) for 1999, an increase of 0.2 percent from the previous year’s figure.

The 1999 ODA budget apparently focuses on crisis-hit Asia, and includes 4.1 billion yen (34.69 million dollars) in grants to Japan’s next-door neighbours for infrastructure development and economic structural reform.

But there are also bigger allocations for training programmes (18 billion yen or 152 million dollars) and special projects to counter the Asian economic crisis (20 billion yen or 169 million dollars).

The amount set aside for international organisations is also up by 11.1 percent at 132 billion yen (1.17 billion dollars), and is meant mostly for fighting poverty, environment destruction and medical and education problems.

The foreign ministry says the crisis in South-east Asia will worsen in the next two to three years, and stressed the need for improving education in the region and helping out the growing impoverished population there.

A foreign ministry official also emphasised the importance of humanitarian aid for the elderly and children in particular. There is also a special emergency grant-in-aid to Indonesia for medical supplies.

“The criticism that more money must be spent on the ‘software’ aspect of humanitarian aid is well taken,” notes foreign ministry official Takeshi Yagi, who is in charge of aid grants. “But the government is well aware of this fact and has been directing funds toward training and technical areas.”

Yagi confirms that Japanese funds to humanitarian organisations such as UNICEF have been geared toward vaccination programmes in developing countries. But he argues that one reason why vaccinations seem to be taking more than a fair share of aid grants is simply because they are expensive.

Still, there has been increasing criticism over Japan’s most prominent diplomatic tool, with many development experts accusing Tokyo of having no strategic planning for its ODA distribution and lacking in global vision.

Other observers have also jumped in the fray, with the popular ‘Mainichi Shimbun’ newspaper calling late last year for a rethink of the ODA budget to China. Instead, it suggested that Tokyo redirect more assistance to health and medical programmes in Africa, citing the increasing number of deaths due to AIDS in that region.

A White Paper released last October on the ODA seems to support this thinking, saying that more attention should be paid to recipients who are truly needy.

Bilateral assistance actually accounts for almost three quarters of the Japanese ODA while less than 10 percent of the country’s aid budget goes to multilateral agencies such as UNICEF and the World Food Programme.

In the case of UNICEF, Japan’s contributions are divided into the obligatory and the voluntary or supplementary funds. Last year, Japan gave 2.5 million dollars as its supplementary contribution to the UNICEF. A million dollars was also earmarked for education programmes in developing countries.

The UNICEF enjoys huge public support in this country. A government move last year to slash contributions to the UN agency by up to 10 percent met such bitter criticism that Tokyo was forced to back down from the plan. ***** Today, however, some experts are urging the government to have a more carefully developed strategy for aid contributions, which they say should be based on country studies that examine the needs of individual recipients, rather than opting for “overall” projects.