Lecturer: Shinya Hanaoka, Professor, Tokyo Institute of Technology

Course Description

This course is part of the UNU Intensive Core (UNU-IC) Courses.

This course has two sections: lectures and group work.

In the lecture series, you can learn about the core issues of developing countries, project evaluation methods, relationships between engineering and international development, applications of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to preserve world heritage sites, natural disasters, and education in the context of international development, global urban climatology and the case of an international plant construction project.

The group work session aims to develop a proposal for an international development project. Suppose you are an expert consultant on a project, and it has been requested that you recommend development policies and projects to politicians and/or economic leaders in a developing country. Developing countries must determine policies and implement projects while balancing social and economic dimensions. Prioritisation of policies is essential since the budget is always insufficient to cover all projects. Politicians and economic leaders must select a specific policy and project as a priority issue for their limited resources. Political situations are not always stable, and thereby, economic activities have been sluggish in some developing countries. The selection of priority issues affects the developmental direction of the country.

The outline of the group work is as follows. First, each group selects one country out of the developing countries with less than $5,000 GDP per capita according to the World Bank. The country selection can be considered using the following criteria: i) The country has not been well developed in its political system and infrastructure. ii) The country faces a number of political and economic challenges. iii) The country has an enormous income gap. Second, we assume nine policies for developing countries: industry, infrastructure, foreign investment, democracy and citizenship, education, finance, governance, hygiene and health, and poverty reduction in the group work, and determine their prioritization order using the method of diamond ranking. Finally, the students propose an effective project to achieve the more highly prioritized policies based on the results of diamond ranking and present an outline of the project that includes the project procedures, positive and negative ripple effects on other sectors/policies, a budget plan complete with financial resources, and methods to be used for procurement.