JICA Projects Lauded in UN Report on Triangular, South-South Cooperation

JICA

South-South Cooperation symbol. Photo supplied.

Last September, the United Nations adopted “the 2030 Agenda forSustainable Development” as new international development goals. These new goals have different features from the previous “Millennium Development Goals” (MDGs) adopted in 2000. One of them is that they highlight the importance of further strengthening “global partnership” in participation with various stakeholders. Considering the scale and ambition of the agenda, it stresses reinvigorating “global partnership,” which was Goal 8 of the MDGs, and bringing together governments, the private sector, civil society, the U.N. system and other actors to mobilize all available resources. In other words, the resources required to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are so huge that mere traditional ODA coming from developed countries cannot meet them and it is essential to mobilize various resources from the private sector and developing countries.

It is in this context that the 2030 Agenda recognizes the role of South-South and Triangular Cooperation as one of the important “means of implementation” for achieving the SDGs, which was not the case at the time of the MDGs. This reflects the fact that developing countries, especially emerging countries, have become significant providers of development cooperation. In fact, the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) estimates that gross development co-operation by countries that are not members of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in 2014 was US$32.7 billion, which accounts for 17.8% of total global ODA-like development co-operation flows in the same year.(*1) It is now a common understanding that the “Southern” resources, knowledge, and technology of developing countries play important roles in international development, which those of the developed countries could not replace.

Against this background, the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation (UNOSSC) issued a publication titled “Good Practices in South-South and Triangular Cooperation for Sustainable Development” this May.

Good Practices in South-South and Triangular Cooperation for Sustainable Development(UNDP website, External Link)

It showcases Southern good practices that are relevant to the implementation of the SDGs, selected either by recommendation from U.N. agencies or from among the good practices that had been nominated during the past Global South-South Development Expos, U.N.-led international conferences in this field. UNOSSC explains the reasons why they published this report as follows:

“Good practices to accelerate sustainable human development are increasingly available in the global South. They can be found in the policies, institutions and programmes that have enabled a number of developing countries to acquire a skilled labour force, create decent jobs, raise productivity and lift millions of their citizens out of grinding poverty. Beyond the countries acting individually, there is a notable surge in international collective actions known as South-South and triangular cooperation. The development community recognizes these approaches as viable pathways to progress in the developing world. In such initiatives, developing countries turn to one another and their Northern partners to address challenges through cooperative alliances and peer-to-peer learning, leading to the widespread application of policies, strategies or practical programmes that have worked to raise living standards in the South.”

What is encouraging to JICA is that, among about 60 examples showcased in this publication, five of them are related to JICA projects.