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The Partnership and Business Development Office (PBDO) of Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) was founded in 1992. Its mission is to increase, through partnership, the funds available for the development research of IDRC’s Southern partners. As IDRC’s work in this area has progressed it has became obvious that an understanding of the foundations, philosophies, and mechanisms of the various forms of official development assistance (ODA) would be essential. It would enable IDRC to confidently approach its partnership work with every expectation of success and benefits for its Southern partners. This series of publications — Profiles for Partnership — presents background, descriptions, and analyses of development-assistance systems around the world.

Partnership with developing-countries institutions — and particularly with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) — is a founding principle of the “IDRC approach” to development assistance. Larger bilateral and multilateral donors have for many decades cofinanced large infrastructure projects, because any single donor or development financier would be unable to assume full financial responsibility and the entire risk. However, it is only recently that larger donor organizations have significantly expanded the use and scope of partnering to work together in a more systematic fashion. In April 1997, for example, the World Bank created its Partnership Department, and now most organizations have partnership units, albeit using many different monikers, including resource mobilization, revenue generation, resource expansion, and cofinancing.

To its critics, however, partnering is simply the latest trend in a long series of tested and discarded ODA practices. I disagree with these critics. Two factors have made the pursuit of partnerships an essential part of development work, both of which seem to have become permanent fixtures of the development landscape. First, the 1990s have born witness to rapidly dwindling financial resources for ODA. Second, both stakeholders and beneficiaries have demanded that aid be more efficient and that duplication and overlap be avoided. These issues are no secret to even the most inexperienced aid practitioner, but they can be addressed through effective partnership.

This first book in the Profiles for Partnership series describes Japan’s ODA system. We begin with Japan for a number of reasons: some obvious, others less so. Japan is currently the largest contributor of ODA. In the area of partnership, however, Japan is generating little in the way of new models or approaches. To increase its output in this area might significantly affect the supply of aid to a large portion of the developing world, not to mention making the already powerful nation of Japan an even stronger and more relevant actor in the development arena. With this background and with IDRC’s mission to support development through research, PBDO initiated a dialogue on partnership with the Research Institute for Development Assistance (RIDA) of Japan’s Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund (OECF). Oddly enough, at about the same time, and actually overtaking us in this initiative, RIDA’s Managing Director, Kizumu Goto, visited IDRC, in June 1997. With support and assistance from a number of sources, including the authors of this book and Charlie Manger (a lawyer from Seattle, Washington), IDRC and RIDA have undertaken detailed discussions on priority areas for joint research and are planning a number of collaborative initiatives. This publication is a direct result of partnership work between IDRC and RIDA and between the Canadian International Development Agency and the Japan International Cooperation Agency.

IDRC has embarked on a serious long-term quest for sustainable partnerships to expand resources for the benefit of our Southern partners. Along the way, we continue to collect and update information on the ways and means of current and potential partners. It was only a modest step for PBDO to decide to share this information with development workers and colleagues around the world in a series of publications, which I hope will both be informative and stimulate better partnerships for better development.

Alain Berranger
Series Editor

Alain Berranger is the Director of IDRC’s PBDO. Mr Berranger has more than 30 years of experience in international development. He obtained his experience in project management primarily in the private sector (heavy industry and engineering consulting) and through management consulting for CIDA, the World Bank, and the United Nations Development Programme, and his work has focused on the development of the private sector, small-business joint ventures, human-resource development, small- and medium-scale industries, and the informal sector. Mr Berranger’s current interests include building partnerships for international development, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of development assistance, and private financing of development research.

Document(s) 1 of 13