Human Security and Afro-Asian Cooperation

Siali Nabila
Fellow at CDG Institute
Ph.D Candidate at Faculty of Law
Mohammed V University, Rabat

After a long experience, it has become well established that Japan could underscore its experience in becoming the only major developed non-Western country and in endeavouring to harmonize with outside cultures even as it maintained its own unique character, and put this experience to use in mediating reconciliation efforts and capacity building in developing countries on the basis of the human security key-concept.
The concept of ‘Human Security’ as a key perspective for Japanese policy and the TICAD process, is including spurring progress towards achieving the eight MDGs by 2015 to combat poverty, hunger, illiteracy, HIV/AIDS and other diseases, discrimination against women and girls, and environmental degradation, peace building, and construction of a task force for environment, climate changes struggle and disaster prevention.
Japan has increasingly played a leading role with genuine initiative and independence over the past decade or so. As an ODA donor unsurpassed by any other country for the last ten consecutive years, Japan’s assumption of the leadership role in this respect stands to logic. Before the end of the Cold War, Japan seemed often mindful of the overall geopolitical implication of its economic and political interactions with the Third World. Ideological considerations now having become unimportant, it would make sense for Japan to go its own way in its external relations. The initiatives to hold the Tokyo International Conference on African Development <TICAD> in 1993 represented both the indication and effect of such a philosophical shift. The holding of TICAD II in 1998, the TICAD III and TICAD IV the summer <of 2008> was even more telling. As the Japanese government puts its plan of action based on four topics <economic grow, environment and climate change, good governance and capacity building, peace building>, which are equal to the concern of the whole international community.

As for China, it has had a long involvement with Africa, going back to the early days of independence movements in the 1960s and before. But the current level and intent of China’s involvement is different. In the last ten years, China’s intentions were primarily diplomatic, i.e. to counter recognition of Taiwan as the representative of China and thus to shore up votes for the eventual rejection of Taiwan’s China credentials in the United Nations. Chinese influence and involvement nevertheless waned in the 1980s as it was unable to compete with western aid programs and no longer was as fearful of Taiwan’s presence-though reducing recognition of Taiwan remained <and remains today> an important Chinese objective.
Taking the case study of Morocco, we have to state that The National Initiative Human Development < INDH > puts Morocco’s social issues at the forefront of the country’s political priorities. Among its most positive features is that it has adopted a participatory approach, which involves civil society and local authorities in both planning and implementation.
However, it is not clear how it fits in with a national development strategy and with the country’s general economic policy, nor how it will help transfer greater political power and resources to local governments as the key agent in the current democracy-building process. On the basis of an analysis of the National Initiative for Human Development launched in 2005 and the Report on 50 years of Human Development in Morocco , we could expect that the INDH lays the groundwork for a new model of economic and political development for Morocco not only in the management of its local economic agenda, but also as key actor within the tripartite formule.
In main African countries the priority of development are focused on three focal points:
1-to reduce the social deficit < both urban and rural > through better access to basic infrastructure and social services such as ‘health, education, literacy, water, electricity, healthy housing, sewage system, mosques, youth centers and cultural and sports infrastructure’,
2-to promote income-generating activities and employment,
and 3-to offer assistance to the most vulnerable social groups to help them emerge from their precarious conditions.
But,  considering that it is physically impossible to guarantee, simultaneous coverage to all regions and all sectors. We would like to question the role of international cooperation in the area of development, not only at the level of financing, sponsorship, investment or widely the ODA, but also by the promotion of a new theoretical setting such the concern we are giving to the Human Security.

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