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FromAid Recipient to Aid Provider: Playing
ToTaiwan’s Advantages and Experience
International development aid began in 1947 when
the United States proposed the Marshall Plan and the
United Nations and other international organizations
such as the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund were founded. Looking back on the history of
our country’s development, we see that the Republic
of China (Taiwan) received aid from the international
community in that very year, and that as a result of the
painstaking efforts of our government and people, we
were able to rise out of the morass of poverty and in
turn create the “Taiwan miracle,” a feat commanding
the world’s attention.
In 1959, Taiwan dispatched its first team of
agriculture specialists to Vietnam to assist in its
agricultural development. This was the beginning of
Taiwan’s experience as a provider of international aid.
Then, from 1960, Taiwan began sending missions
to African partner countries to assist with agriculture
via Operation Vanguard. Nowadays, more than 50
years hence, Taiwan’s foreign aid efforts are being
carried out in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and Latin
America and the Caribbean. This sharing of the “Taiwan
experience” has yielded fruitful results and serves as
a model of success for aid recipient countries as they
make their transition into providers of aid.
2015 will be a key year for international
development. The completion of the UN MDGs
represents a milestone in the achievements of
development, leading the world toward the pursuit
of a further set of Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs) over the next 15 years. The TaiwanICDF is
Taiwan’s official development assistance organization.
Since being founded in 1996, the TaiwanICDF has
shared Taiwan’s development experience with partner
countries to create an abundance of cooperative
results, abiding by current practices in foreign aid and
remaining committed to development issues of global
concern. In the future, the organization will continue
to pursue its vision of partnerships for progress
and sustainable development, applying up-to-date
strategies in order to carry out its mission, inaugurating
a new phase in Taiwan’s foreign aid work, and making
concrete contributions to the global SDGs.
Gaining an In-depth Understanding of the
Needs of Partner Countries, Continuing to
Pursue Project Effectiveness
Reviewing our key efforts in 2014, the TaiwanICDF
put the guiding principles of its founding charter into
practice, following an effective, concrete, pragmatic
and feasible development approach as part of
the constant pursuit of progress in its designated
operational priorities. For instance, in agriculture, even
as we remained mindful of boosting production, we
also began to consider matters upstream, providing
better seeds, livestock, poultry and fish, as well as
matters downstream, setting up quality testing systems
for fruits and vegetables, and creating a trade system
for agricultural produce.
Regarding public health and medicine, we abided
by the focal points of international development
aid, actively developing maternal health programs,
follow-up management for communicable and non-
communicable diseases, health promotion and
prevention plans, and health care systems. As for
education, we focused on how to enhance the
curricula of scholarship programs and workshops,
and designed integrated, interdisciplinary programs
aligned to the development needs of partner countries.
To apply Taiwan’s strengths in ICT and meet partner
countries’ requirements in terms of administration and
ease of life, in addition to introducing e-government
measures to improve expediency, we also built
on the same principles to improve education,
medicine, women’s empowerment, and government
accountability and transparency, as well as other
areas. As for environmental protection, we integrated
Taiwan’s space and remote sensing, geographic
information system (GIS) and global positioning
system (GPS) technologies to help regional allies in
building disaster prevention and relief systems, and we
are also cooperating with regional development banks
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Aspiring toward Partnerships for Progress and a Future
Embodied by Sustainable Development
Looking Ahead