# International Trends of Assistance and Japan's Commitments

### Section 1. Consolidation of the Result-Oriented Tendency in Aid

In recent years, the tendency on international development assistance has shifted to results-oriented. As providing development aid continuously for extensive period of time, developed countries had often succumbed to “aid fatigue,” stemming from the sense that tangible results of aid had not necessarily been achieved.

Based on these experiences, the international community has shifted towards emphasizing on performance and achievement in development assistance such as the introduction of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP), agreed at the Annual Meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1999, and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), complied by the United Nations in 2001. The international community is accelerating efforts to establish common goals for development and to coordinate various aid entities to achieve the goals.

The PRSP is a concrete action plan formulated by the involved developing country itself, based on close dialogue with donor countries and international organizations, aiming at poverty reduction and premised on a certain amount of aid funds. The PRSP consists of actual targets, action guidelines, and methodology.

The MDGs, which are internationally common and quantitatively measurable, have contributed to enhancing the consciousness and motivation for development assistance, under the banner of poverty reduction as a theme that can be shared by each one of us. The MDGs have also helped spur on a results-oriented approach in development assistance. In the past, measures generally used as the targets of assistance were largely based on the discussion on “input”—the total amount of assistance or the percentage of Gross National Income (GNI). Such discussion often missed effects made by assistance, which were only made among few experts, such as how much the income of developing countries have increased and how literacy rates have augmented.

In contrast, the MDGs focus on the effect and achievement of assistance as establishing eight comprehensive indicators and goals, such as “to halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger” and “to ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling.” According to the latest Millennium Development Goals Report released by the UN in August 2008, the goal of halving extreme poverty by 2015 remains within reach in the world as a whole, while it is hardly achievable in Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2008, the UN held a high level MDGs meeting in September 2008 to review the progress of the MDGs and discuss future approaches. The international community including Japan makes various efforts to achieve the MDGs by 2015.

### Section 2. Collaboration among Donor Countries

### 1. International Trends and Japan

Aid coordination in the past tended to emphasize on coordination and adjustment among donors on each single project. However, recent international trends of development aid emphasize the ownership of developing countries. A mainstream idea is that donor countries and organizations jointly support developing countries' own development plans and priority issues, with donors and recipients working together to achieve the development goals of the recipient countries.

In order to achieve common development challenges such as the MDGs and country-based PRSP, it is necessary not only to increase the amount of aid but also to provide more effective aid by improving the quality of assistance. The effective use of aid by recipient countries themselves, based on an awareness of their ownership, is the most