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Industrializing Africa and "Building Resilience beyond 2015": JICA-RI Hosts Parallel Sessions at the GDN Annual Conference

2014.07.01

DayJune 18, 2014(Wed) - June 20, 2014(Fri)
PlaceAccra, Ghana

From June 18 to 20, the 15th GDN* (Global Development Network) Annual Conference was convened in Accra, the capital of Ghana under the theme of “Structural Transformation in Africa and Beyond.” JICA-RI, which serves as the hub institution for GDN-Japan, hosted two parallel sessions entitled “Industrializing Africa” and “Building Resilience beyond 2015.”

The conference assembled over 430 people from the GDN’s regional network partners, the World Bank, the African Development Bank (AfDB), the United Nations agencies, and NGOs and private think tanks around the world. From JICA-RI, it was attended by Director Hiroshi Kato (Vice President of JICA), Senior Research Advisor (SRA) Akio Hosono, Senior Research Fellow Go Shimada, Research Program Division Chief Hironobu Murakami, and Research Program Division Officer Akiko Aikawa.

On June 18, JICA-RI co-hosted a parallel session entitled “Industrializing Africa” with the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD) based at Columbia University. The collaborative research results of JICA-RI and IPD focusing on industrial policies in Africa were shared with the participants. SRA Hosono presented a case study with a focus on three key dimensions in the process of structural economic transformation: changes in the initial condition to enable a transformation (readiness); factors that initiate the changes (trigger); and elements that maintain and promote the momentum of transformation (drivers). From IPD, Professor Akbar Norman of Columbia University and Senior Fellow John Page of the Brookings Institution gave presentations respectively.

On the following day, another parallel session entitled “Building Resilience beyond 2015” from the Asian perspective was co-hosted by JICA-RI and East Asian Development Network (EADN), a GDN regional network in East Asia. Senior Research Fellow Shimada gave a presentation on the recovery of employment and structural shift in the tertiary sector industries from the perspective of long-term reconstruction after the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake.

At the conference, winners were selected and announced for the Japanese Award for Most Innovative Development Project and Japanese Award for Outstanding Research on Development sponsored by the World Bank’s Policy and Human Resources Development Fund, which the Japanese government contributes to. Director Kato, as a chairperson of the selection committee, presented the award to the researchers at the closing ceremony.

Director Kato（second from left）
and winners

*GDN is a non-profit international body that aims to present and share recent research results through networking. The headquarters of GDN is based in New Delhi, India. JICA-RI is a hub institution of GDN Japan, one of the eleven GDN regional networks.