JICA’s reason to start its staff blog

JICA is currently renewing its official website for the first time in almost 10 years. It will take a while to complete renewing the entire website, because it is information-rich, containing about 80,000 pages, and we are renewing it in stages.

In the renewal process, we are working on some challenges. Of them, we will particularly focus on the following three targets to aim for: (1) Enhancing understandability, (2) Improving accessibility, and (3) Sharing useful information.

The first target, "Enhancing understandability" includes both the clarity of the information itself and the clarity of the entire website. In this renewal, we take extra care of the latter to promote user understandability.

It came to our attention that some visitors have experienced getting lost on our website while in search of information. In fact, even JICA staff find it difficult to reach the desired information unless clicking many times to go deeper on the website. To address this, we have set a high goal of enabling users to reach information in three clicks from JICA’s homepage in the renewal. Accomplishing this was a hard job; however, I think it is definitely better than what it used to be. I hope the readers out there would feel the same.

The second target, "improving accessibility" is to ensure the website to be equally accessible to all users, including people with disabilities and the elderly. This renewal is the opportunity to achieve this. At present, there are non-HTML format files remaining on the website which could cause inconvenience to the users. We will continue working to ensure that all the pages meet the standards required of public institutions.

To achieve the third target, "sharing useful information," it is vital to disclose necessary information in a prompt and easily understandable manner given the accountability in mind. What’s more, I believe JICA may be able to share more valuable and useful information with you all. We often hear requests from various people, whom we exchange opinions, to provide more useful information that only JICA can offer.

JICA has 96 offices worldwide and operates in about 150 countries and regions. JICA also carries out activities to connect people in various parts of Japan and developing countries through our 15 offices in Japan. The achievement of the SDGs, which many people in Japan are interested in, is in fact the very purpose of the activities we have been engaged in developing countries for many years. We came to realize that if the information and knowledge we have gained through our everyday work is useful to someone, we should share it.

With this in mind, we have decided to open this PR Department’s staff blog as a forum to share information, insights, and knowledge that JICA has accumulated through the work, both as an organization and as each individual working for JICA.

In this blog, we will share information from the perspective of each JICA staff in their own words. The blog will cover a wide range of topics, such as country-specific situations in specific developing countries, various social issues facing the world and developing countries, things we pay attention to in our international cooperation, current topics, as well as staffs’ personal insights, analysis, opinions, and thoughts.

It will be my utmost pleasure if our readers find this blog useful.