A total of about 13.3 billion yen in Japan's official development assistance (ODA) programs failed to achieve the designated goals, the Board of Audit of Japan found in its Audit Report for fiscal 2018 released this month.
The ineffective projects, in the Solomon Islands, Vietnam and Indonesia, include grant aid for building a water treatment facility and offering vessels to monitor illegal fishing activities. It turned out that neither the facility nor the vessels have been properly used.
Solomon Islands
The Solomon Islands in the South Pacific has been plagued with insufficient infrastructure due to its tribal conflicts. People in its capital city, Honiara, have long been faced with the challenge of securing safe water, because spring water -- the main source of domestic water -- becomes muddy every time torrential rains hit the area.
The Japanese government in 2014 constructed in the city a facility to improve water quality in a grant aid program of 2.09 billion yen. According to the project outline, the facility would purify and sterilize 1,600 cubic meters of water per day, which would be sent to a distribution reservoir via existing water pipes before being supplied to each household.
In the watchdog's follow-up study on the project, however, it was discovered that the pipes are so old and deteriorated that leakages siphoned off the pressure required to push the purified water to its destination. As a result, the local water service authority ended up supplying spring water by bypassing the facility.
Although the project expected that the occurrence of high concentrations of muddiness would be gone, the capital city instead experienced 21 cases of such incidents in 2017.
According to the board, a Japanese consulting company designed and built the facility without considering potential leaks from the water pipes. The company was assigned the job from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), an organization that carries out Japan's ODA programs. On the part of JICA, it has left the problem unresolved without conducting a detailed fact-finding investigation even after noticing the fact that the facility was unusable after its completion.
Vietnam
As Vietnam has experienced incessant illegal fishing activities mainly by Chinese fishing boats in its territorial waters, Japan provided in 2015 six used vessels as patrol ships in a grant aid program. In its study this March on the aid, the board found that three of the ships, worth 210 million yen, had been moored at a shipbuilding company's dock without being deployed even once.
The Foreign Ministry asked the Vietnamese government in April 2017 to utilize the ships but did not fully follow up on the situation. After the board's study, the three unused ships have gone through necessary refits, and two of them have been placed into service.
Indonesia
In Indonesia, a sewerage facility constructed in 2008 under a loan development program of around 11 billion yen in Denpasar, a city on the country's most major tourist island of Bali, has been underperforming in terms of treated water quality since 2017.
Because sludge piled up at the bottom of a reservoir to store sewage, the amount of biochemical oxygen demand in the sewage -- a gauge for water pollution -- was 40-60 milligrams per liter. This is much worse than the environmental yardstick of 5 milligrams per liter or less that indicates sewage-resistant fish such as carp and crucian carp can survive. The worse-than-standard treated water has poured into rivers and the sea.
In response to the board's findings, the Foreign Ministry has pledged to improve the situation to produce results set by the ODA program. In acknowledging the findings, JICA said it "will be fully responsive to the facts."
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