Efficiency Plan for Saemaul-Undong Official Development Assistance (ODA)

This study hypothesizes that, in development cooperation implementation, detrimental effects have resulted from employing extremely general Saemaul-Undong (SMU) success factors and from transferring SMU Official Development Assistance (ODA) without a consideration of recipient countries’ features. The aims of this paper were threefold: to summarize the key success factors of SMU from the perspective of development cooperation; to use a field study to verify the limitations of applying these factors to development cooperation projects in developing countries; and to seek solutions for overcoming these limitations in the future. From the perspective of development cooperation, the success of SMU depends on the following factors: a country’s political commitment (i.e., its top-down approach to projects); the participation of motivated villagers (i.e., its bottom-up approach to projects); and the identification of leaders in each village. To achieve our study’s objectives, we conducted a case analysis of Vietnam’s "new rural integrated development businesses"(Nong thon moi), from which we derived the following observations for SMU ODA projects: detailed implementation plans for village units must be seamlessly integrated into mid- to long-term governmental support plans; development strategies are urgently needed to address the Vietnamese government’s growing financial burdens for "new rural development businesses"; ODA projects should be promoted not in the form of large-scale infrastructure projects, but as feasible small-scale projects based on a consideration of the distinctiveness of target areas; local officials and village leaders should attend education/training programs prior to conducting rural area development projects; and finally, a new business modality should be developed to motivate villagers in participating communities.