TANAKA Akihiko

United Nations Development Programme Administrator Helen Clark, left, with JICA President Akihiko Tanaka.

JICA President Akihiko Tanaka held talks Nov. 21 at JICA Headquarters in Tokyo with Helen Clark, administrator of the United Nations Development Programme.

Since 1988, JICA has been constantly dispatching staff members to UNDP and continuing exchange with the organization. And with UNDP, JICA has been advancing the current Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals (1), as well as hammering out international assistance trends of the Post-2015 Development Agenda (2) including human security, disaster management, Universal Health Coverage (3) and more. JICA has also been advancing with UNDP field level partnerships on African development assistance and on reconstruction assistance. Also, Tanaka is serving as a member of the advisory panel for the UNDP Human Development Report.

At the beginning of the talks, Clark thanked Tanaka for attending the HDR 2014 advisory panel meeting held in New York in early November. She also appreciated JICA for its cooperation on the MDGs Acceleration Framework (MAF), a framework for achieving the current MDGs that UNDP is advocating, and for JICA's contribution to South-South cooperation. And in the future, she said, she would like, with JICA, to consolidate into one the three parallel movements of the Post-2015 Development Agenda, post-Hyogo (4) and climate finance.

Moreover, Administrator Clark praised Japan's efforts in holding the fifth Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD V) in June, discussed support for areas in conflict, and emphasized the importance of assistance that seamlessly integrates humanitarian assistance and development assistance.

After explaining JICA's cooperation for other countries accepting Syrian refugees and for South Sudan, Tanaka affirmed that JICA would deepen its relationship with UNDP through detailed discussions.

Notes:
1. Sustainable Development Goals. At the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), Sustainable Development Goals (from the perspective of the earth's environment) for all countries were defined, and it was agreed to integrate them into the Post-2015 Development Agenda.
2. International development goals to succeed the Millennium Development Goals, the deadline for achievement of which is 2015.
3. Universal Health Coverage (UHC). UHC refers to "the ability of all people to receive appropriate services related to health promotion, prevention, medical treatment and functional recovery at a cost they can pay." Achieving UHC was adopted as a new common goal for the international community at the United Nations General Assembly in December 2012.
4. International disaster management effort guidelines to succeed the Hyogo Framework for Action (2005-2015) decided on at the Second United Nations World Conference on Disaster Reduction (held in Kobe, Hyogo prefecture, Japan, in January 2005). The Post-Hyogo Framework of Action will be decided upon at the Third United Nations World Conference on Disaster Reduction (to be held in Sendai, Miyagi prefecture, in March 2015).

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