About JICA

Japan Bank for International Co-operation (JBIC) is a Japanese Government financial institution which was incorporated on the 1st October, 1999 after the merger of erstwhile Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund of Japan (OECF) and the Export Import Bank of Japan (EXIM). Its headquarters is at Tokyo and the Bank operates through its 27 representative offices located across the world, extending financial assistance to 94 countries. The JBIC was created as an Organization which shapes Japan’s economic policy and co-operation in response to the changing scenario of the world economy.

India is the first recipient country of the Japanese ODA loans ( 1958). This year (2007) the JBIC is celebrating its fiftieth year of very illustrious and successful presence in India. The basic purpose of the operations of the JBIC is to provide concessional long-term, low-interest fund (ODA loans) needed for the self-help efforts of developing countries, for socio-economic infrastructure development and economic stabilization. ODA loans are an integral form of financial assistance which is essential for a developing country to put in place socio-economic infrastructure required for the economic development. The JBIC has also been the largest bilateral donor to India for more than a decade.

And the JBIC has been merged with the Japan International Co-operational Agency (JICA) in October, 2008 and the new entity has been named as JICA, consequently the name of the Tripura Project has also been changed to the Tripura JICA Project.
Mission Statement

New JICA
Vision, Mission and Strategy
Marking its launch as a renewed organization, New JICA has announced an all-new Vision. Together with this Vision it has defined four Missions, to be achieved through four main Strategies. It has also declared a set of Guiding Principles meant to help advance its Strategies.

Vision
Inclusive and Dynamic Development
“Inclusive development” represents an approach to development that encourages all people to recognize the development issues they themselves face, participate in addressing them, and enjoy the fruits of such endeavors. The role of New JICA is to effectively provide backing for this process.
“Dynamic development” refers to the creation of self-reinforcing virtuous cycles of mid- to long-term economic growth and poverty reduction in a constantly changing environment of developing countries where a variety of issues arise simultaneously and get entangled each other. New JICA will provide creative, highly effective support toward this end, at times moving swiftly and at times acting from the longer-term perspective as the situation calls for.

Mission 1
Addressing the global agenda
The advance of globalization brings positive effects, sparking economic development and providing people with new opportunities. It also has its negative side, though, including such effects as uneven wealth distribution and the cross-border issues of climate change, infectious diseases, terrorism, and expanding economic crises. These effects pose a threat to the stability and prosperity of Japan—which depends on resources from around the world—and the rest of the international community. The threat is particularly dire for developing countries. New JICA will make full use of Japan’s experience and technologies as it works in concert with international society to address the various globalization-related issues developing countries face in a comprehensive manner.

Mission 2
Reducing poverty through equitable growth
Impoverished people in developing countries are particularly susceptible to the effects of economic crisis, conflict, and disaster and are constantly exposed to the risk of even deeper poverty. Moreover, growing wealth gaps are a destabilizing factor in societies. Helping people to escape poverty and lead healthy, civilized lives is a vital task not only for the growth of developing countries but also for the stability of the international community. To reduce poverty, employment opportunities must be expanded through equitable growth that gives proper consideration to impoverished members of society, and public services like education and healthcare must be enhanced. New JICA will provide support for human resources development, capacity building, policy and institutional improvements, and provision of social and economic infrastructure, thereby pursuing sustained poverty reduction through equitable growth.

Mission 3
Improving governance
A state’s capacity for governance refers to its status as a society that can take the resources available to it and direct, apportion, and manage them efficiently and in ways that reflect the will of the people. Improving governance is of vital importance to the stable economic growth of developing countries. However, these states often have underdeveloped legal and judicial systems and administrative organs, which present obstacles to efforts to reduce poverty through economic growth. New JICA will offer support aimed at improving the fundamental systems needed by a state, as well as systems for effectively providing public services based on the needs of people, and at fostering the institutions and human resources needed to manage those systems appropriately.

Mission 4
Achieving human security
The advance of globalization causes an increase in various cross-border dangers and exposes many people in developing countries to civil strife, disasters, poverty, and other humanitarian threats. The concept of human security places individual human beings at its core, seeking to defend them from fear and want: fear of things like conflict, terrorism, disaster, environmental destruction, and infectious disease, and want in the face of poverty and in social services and infrastructure. By building up people’s abilities to address these issues themselves, this approach aims to build societies in which they can live with dignity. In order to defend the weakest members of society from these various threats, New JICA will support efforts to bolster social and institutional capacity and to increase people’s ability to deal with threats themselves.


Strategy 1
Integrated assistance
New JICA will undertake the integrated management of three modalities of assistance—technical cooperation, ODA loans, and grant aid—to offer comprehensive support that organically combines such elements as policy and institutional improvements in developing countries; human resources development and capacity building; and improvements in infrastructure. We will also make use of diverse approaches and take advantage of the expanded scale of our operations to tackle issues that go beyond borders and affect entire regions or that span multiple sectors. Through such integrated assistance, New JICA will pursue international cooperation with even more development impact in terms of both its quality and scale.

Strategy 2
Seamless assistance
New JICA brings together a wide variety of aid approaches to provide seamless assistance that spans everything from prevention of armed conflict and natural disasters to emergency aid following a conflict or disaster, assistance for prompt recovery, and mid- to long-term development assistance. Among developing countries are states at various stages of development, from the least developed countries where most of the population lives in poverty to middle-income countries that are on the growth track but are still wrestling with the problems of wealth gaps in society. New JICA will provide assistance in ways that best match the level of development in each recipient nation, taking a long-term perspective and offering seamless assistance to ensure sustainable development into the future.

Strategy 3
Promoting development partnerships
New JICA aims to be a good partner for developing countries, accurately grasping their changing needs through a focus on the field and promoting their own self-help efforts swiftly and effectively through a focus on results. We will also promote public-private partnerships, pooling the experience, technologies, and resources of local governments, universities, nongovernmental organizations, and other actors. Furthermore, to fulfill our responsibilities as one of the largest donor organizations in the world with more than 40 years of experience, we will strengthen partnerships with international organizations and other donor institutions, leading the creation of a broad framework for development assistance in a global community that is seeing growing numbers of players in the international cooperation field and increasingly diverse forms of aid to developing countries.

Strategy 4
Enhancing research and knowledge-sharing
In the face of the advance of globalization and the rise of new international cooperation actors, global trends in the issues affecting developing countries are undergoing sweeping change. Through the establishment of the JICA Research Institute, New JICA will put its wisdom gained in the field to work, building broad networks of academics from Japan and elsewhere around the world to create new knowledge value in the field of international development assistance not just for Japan but also for the entire world. To play a leading role in guiding the newest development trends, we will enhance our research and knowledge-sharing capacities. We will also actively carry out surveys and research grounded in actual assistance projects, focusing on the subjects in both regional and issue-based contexts.