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Safety and Security Management for International Volunteers: A Case Study of Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers in Colombia during the War on Drugs
Get PDFThe safety and security of aid workers has emerged as an important theme for humanitarian organizations and in scholarly literature. However, there is a dearth of research on volunteers who work abroad with governmental programs such as the US Peace Corps and the Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers (JOCV). In particular, no research has been published on the safety and security issues faced by those within the JOCV program. To this end, the paper aims to explore how JOCV volunteers managed their safety in Colombia between 1985 and 1991 by analyzing their first-person accounts in their隊員報告書Taiin hōkoku sho or JOCV working reports. It also looks at how the safety and security challenges of Colombia at that time affected their ability to carry out their projects. Their experiences provide rich material for study because Colombia experienced frequent domestic terrorist attacks and growing instability during this period. As the study will demonstrate, the stringent security approach introduced by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) worked to protect JOCV volunteers in Colombia. The volunteers demonstrated growing awareness of their personal safety and security, in addition to complying with JICA’s security mandates, adopted individual strategies to stay safe. Thus, the numbers reporting encounters with crime and violence fell annually even though Colombia’s security situation continued to deteriorate. However, JICA’s security requirements, such as restricting where and when volunteers could work, created significant challenges for the advancement of their projects and their need to deepen trust in their working relationships with locals. The study also raises key implications for contemporary security management. These include recognizing volunteers as a rich source of field intelligence when assessing safety and security, avoiding a ‘one-size-fit-all’ approach to security protocols, and communicating about security measures that could be construed as insensitive to local staff.departmental bulletin pape
Managing International Cooperation Projects for Organizational Capacity Development: A Design-Focused Case Study of the Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology
Get PDFBecoming a more successful society, according to mainstream views about development, depends on strengthening organizations. For this reason, the intent of international development cooperation projects properly includes strengthening partner-organizations. However, development agencies face a decision-dilemma. To strengthen a partner-organization, the development agency needs to participate in its management process. On the other hand, such participation would foreseeably cause the partner-organization to become dependent on the development agency, weakening its capabilities. It is thus rational for a development agency to intervene, and it is rational not to intervene. This paper develops a purposive theory of organization-strengthening international development projects that brings this decision-dilemma to the fore, while also reporting and analyzing a specific case of such projects, named in the paper's sub-title. The design-focused case study shows how this decision-dilemma can be eased through by the use of a well-designed mechanism for participating in the management-process of partner-organizations during project operation. The paper's purposive theorizing and design-focused case study are meant not only to advance professional knowledge about strengthening partner-organizations as part of international development cooperation projects, but also to illustrate an emerging method for advancing professional knowledge about public management, generally.departmental bulletin pape
Sexual Exploitation of Trafficked Children: Evidence from Bangladesh
Get PDFAlthough human trafficking is a serious humanitarian problem of global scale, there is very little knowledge about the issue. Using a nationally representative survey of child sex workers in Bangladesh, this study examines the extent to which trafficking victims are forced to expend more effort than non-trafficked sex workers. To control for endogeneity of trafficking victimization, we use frequency of natural disasters occurred in their hometown as an instrumental variable. We find that the victims face higher exposure to violence and drug use, and lower freedom to quit the job. They also trade sex with more clients at a lower wage. However, victimization is not associated with condom use or prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases. These results suggest that while owners commit violence to extract the victims’ efforts, some of them also maintain the victims’ productivity.departmental bulletin pape
EMERGING ECONOMIES AND THE CHANGING DYNAMICS OF DEVELOPMENT COOPERATION
Get PDFAlmost two decades have passed since ‘emerging donors’ – new providers of development cooperation – began to attract the attention of ‘traditional donors’. Comprehensive comparisons of the various features of different types of donors have thus been elaborated on as their economic and political roles have solidified. Subsequently, the focus has also expanded to cover the growing significance of cooperation between ‘new donors’ themselves, beyond high-profile groups such as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). This issue of the IDS Bulletin is a collaboration between the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) Research Institute and the Institute of Development Studies (IDS). The studies are dedicated to highlighting the actual and potential contribution of a wider range of donors, and are intended to help compensate for imbalances in existing literature, contribute to scholarly understanding, and offer informative insights for practical policy deliberation. More fundamentally, this issue questions the explicit and implicit underlying assumptions in examining the issue of development cooperation: namely, the dichotomy of ‘traditional’ and ‘emerging’ donors. The subjects covered in the various articles range from exploring the importance of knowledge in the development cooperation experience of emerging economies; the challenges involved in the policy formulation and implementation of triangular cooperation within a sometimes contradictory set of processes embedded in South–South cooperation; the dynamics of ‘two-way interaction’ between donors and recipients in chains of knowledge creation; and there is an important reassessment of the critical data upon which estimates of China’s foreign aid disbursements are made and understood in international comparison.journal articl
Critical Factors for Success among Social Enterprises in India
Get PDFIn addressing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it is expected that governments, private sector businesses and civil society organizations will be involved. Social enterprises, in particular, are attracting global attention. While international development agencies have increased their investment in social enterprises, empirical research on their business practices remains limited. For the purpose of determining factors critical to the success of social enterprises in a developing world context, this paper examines the cases of for-profit social enterprises that provide goods and services necessary for poor communities constituting the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) in India. The paper identifies the distinctive business approaches that enable social enterprises to continue their work in what can be described as a challenging and critical geographical context.departmental bulletin pape
Inverse J-Shaped Relationship between Fertility and Gender Equality: Different Relationships of the Two Variables According to Income Levels
Get PDFThe fertility decline, which started first in developed countries, has been observed among most developing countries since the latter half of the 20th century. On the other hand, among developed countries, the long-lasting decline of fertility seems to have stopped in recent decades, and a modest recovery of fertility has been observed in most countries.
A large number of studies focusing on the relationship between fertility and gender equality have been conducted. However, gender equality is composed of various aspects, and the relationship between fertility and gender equality could be different at different levels of economic development. This study aims to empirically examine the relationship between fertility and gender equality according to countries’ different income levels, using the integrated framework for both the fertility decline in developing countries and the fertility recovery in developed countries. This study employs the panel dataset including fertility and the GGGI (Global Gender Gap Index) published annually by the World Economic Forum. The main findings of this study are as follows: First, this study observes the inverse J-shaped () relationship between fertility and the progress of overall gender equality measured by the GGGI. This means that progress toward gender equality has a negative relationship with fertility until a certain level of development is achieved, at which point the relationship becomes positive. The inverse J-relationship is also found between fertility and the progress toward gender equality in the economy. Second, in the “low-income and modest decline of fertility” country group, where the average total fertility rate was still over 5 in 2015, the progress in overall gender equality and in gender equality in the economy do not have a particular relationship with fertility. In contrast, female life expectancy is positively correlated to fertility. Third, the progress in gender equality in literacy is important for lowering fertility regardless of income level. In middle-income countries, progress in gender equality in school enrolment is negatively correlated with fertility in all education levels.departmental bulletin pape