KAIDEC President Visits JICA-RI

In her presentation, Professor Kim introduced South Korea’s experience of remarkable transformation from a major ODA recipient to an OECD DAC donor over the past six decades. Her data showed that Korea, which used to rely on foreign aid (total of $12.78 billion was received from 1945-1995), has grown to be an economy of over $983 billion and now provides financial and technical support to developing countries. In December 2011, Korea became the first Asian country to host the High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness. [Read articles on HLF-4]

As the country with a success story of overcoming poverty in less than 20 years and eliminating aid dependency, Professor Kim stressed that Korea can contribute to the world with “added value.” Also, she spoke of the importance of having both economic development and democratization for better development. “In the past, we had been criticized for having an authoritarian state that led our development process...We want to say that we had some failures and we’d like to share that with the world... Even in our own experience, we could say that having these together was very critical and that’s the lesson we’d like to share.”

Ms. Eun Mee Kim
President, Korea Association of International Development and Cooperation