Akihiko Tanaka, who returned to the top post at a government-linked aid agency earlier this month, vowed Friday to help people fleeing Ukraine following the Russian invasion of the Eastern European country.
"In addition to offering emergency financial aid to the Ukrainian government, we'd like to examine what we can do and provide necessary support to the evacuees," said Tanaka, 67, who returned to the helm of the Japan International Cooperation Agency on April 1 after a hiatus of over six years.
JICA has dispatched personnel to Moldova, a neighbor of Ukraine, to grasp what is needed to help evacuees from the war-torn country through visits to shelters and exchanges of opinions with local medical institutions.
Japan has decided to provide emergency humanitarian aid worth $200 million including financial support for countries that accept large numbers of refugees from Ukraine amid the mass exodus.
Tanaka, an expert in international politics and former head of Japan's National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, also said the coronavirus pandemic led to the first increase in the number of people in extreme poverty across the world in over two decades in 2020.
Tanaka called on Japan to implement aid while addressing the pandemic and the effects of the war in Ukraine, which he said have been "dealing a heavy blow" to the most "vulnerable" people in developing economies.
Referring to JICA's retaining an office in China even after Tokyo's decades-old official development aid to the country ended in March, he said it was important for the world's third- and second-largest economies to cooperate in the field of development assistance.
Tanaka replaced Shinichi Kitaoka, a former president of the International University of Japan, as JICA chief. Until Kitaoka took the top post in October 2015, Tanaka had served as head of the agency for three and a half years from 2012.
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