Background
The KU-JICA joint symposium aims to deepen the understanding of Human Security and its Capacity Development. In addition, the symposium can give an opportunity to exchange views about the current research activities in several overseas bases, namely Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia, concerned to Human Security Engineering. |
The advance of globalization causes an increase in various cross-border dangers and exposes many people in developing countries to civil strife, disasters, poverty, and other humanitarian threats. The concept of human security places individual human beings at its core, seeking to defend them from fear and want: fear of things like conflict, terrorism, disaster, environmental destruction, and infectious disease, and want in the face of poverty and in social services and infrastructure. By building up people's abilities to address these issues themselves, this approach aims to build societies in which they can live with dignity. In order to defend the weakest members of society from these various threats, Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) will support efforts to bolster social and institutional capacity and to increase people's ability to deal with threats themselves under the policy of Japanese Official Development Assistance (ODA)
From a viewpoint of Human Security, it is definite that the various development issues in Asian Megacities are very urgent ones to be tackled with. Since those issues are closely connected with each other, it is required that a comprehensive approach shall be taken to combine and to collaborate with several academic and research fields. In a sense of this, the Global Center of Excellence Program (GCOE) entitled “Global Center for Education and Research on Human Security Engineering for Asian Megacities” implemented by Kyoto University (KU) is absolutely significant and timely.