Background of Research
Korea has dramatically increased its ODA share for rural development projects such as Integrated Rural Development or rural Saemaul Undong. Following the transformation, there arises the need to establish cooperation models and strategies for effective and efficient implementation of the ODA projects and programmes. This study has the purpose to review diverse approaches and cases related with rural development, and to suggest policy tasks to build effective cooperative models and strategies for focus countries.

Method of Research
The study utilizes statistics and databases including the Korea EXIM Bank’s KIDS, the database system about Korean ODA, and the OECD StatExtracts, databases available from OECD website. Many project reports and research papers from the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) are also reviewed. The part about Korean Saemaul Undong was based on the report submitted from the researcher group of Yeungnam University.

Research Results and Implications
International discussions about agriculture and rural development sectors have been shifted from income boosting assistance to regional development and reduction of rural-urban disparity. This study reviews current poverty situations of twenty countries. These countries are part of focus countries of Korean ODA, and agriculture and/or rural sectors are designated as special concerned areas for cooperation.
Korean ODA in the rural development sector has concentrated on Southeast Asian countries and Sub-Saharan African regions. The ODA amount for the sector exploded for the period between 2006 and 2011 more than 10 times. Rural development projects have chosen mostly the income generating and education/training activities as their sub-component projects.
Various public agencies are currently implementing Saemaul Undong ODA projects which may require coordination and collaboration among them. To identify its unique elements different from other development approaches is urgently needed. For now, more efforts should be put into how to develop many demonstration projects hitherto implemented in developing countries to become national-level development strategies for their rural development.
This study presents a 'Standard List' in which sub-components or activities are shown as references, which are extracted from the existent rural development projects including Saemaul Undong. General conditions and special conditions for application of the rural development model are also presented. General conditions are ownership of the recipient countries, and inclusive partnership, whereas special conditions are: focus on capacity building, coordinated development of various sectors, and appropriate regional boundary for the project.
For the strategy, we select categories for analyzing the situations of target countries, and the categories are: general socio-economic conditions, performance of MDGs, and current level of development of agriculture and rural sectors. Macro-level strategies, both national and sectoral, are reviewed as well as the Country Partnership Strategy (CPS) of Korea. For illustration, rural development strategies are presented for Vietnam, Ethiopia and Colombia.


Researchers: Heo, Jang; Jeong, Seung Eun
Research Period: 2013. 1 ~ 2013. 12
E-mail address: heojang@krei.re.kr