Statement by Minister TANINAI Ichitomo at the Technical Assistance and Cooperation Committee (TACC) Meeting starting on Monday, 18 November 2024 Item 3: Evaluation of technical cooperation activities in 2024

2024/11/18
Thank you, Chair,
 
Japan appreciates the tireless efforts of the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) in preparing its Evaluation Report and in convening the informal briefing held on 22 October.
 
As Japan strongly supports the Technical Cooperation Programme (TCP), we commend the OIOS’s activities to promote the IAEA’s continuous improvement in the implementation of TCP by providing an objective evaluation of the TCP and facilitating organizational learning. We would like to encourage the Secretariat to take into account the recommendations and findings of the OIOS report and to implement the TCP more effectively and efficiently to make the best use of limited resources.
 
Japan would like to make brief comments on the findings of the OIOS on the two programs. Firstly, Japan would like to highlight the conclusion of the CLEA-R in Africa in paragraph 63 of the report, pointing out the “particular need to systematically plan for the trajectory from the beginning of activities to scaling-up and follow-through” to achieve the ambitious goal of ensuring food security. As a major donor of Atoms4Food-related projects in Africa, Japan requests the Secretariat to make the utmost efforts to ensure the integrated implementation of various projects in food and agriculture, which utilize different nuclear techniques, to make this initiative successful.
 
Chair,

In paragraph 84 of the report, despite the understanding that regional and inter-regional projects should contain only minimal equipment components, 141 projects have spent more than half of their budgets on equipment procurement, some of which were not planned at the design stage. In this regard, we call upon the Secretariat to carefully plan the procurement of large-scale equipment from the design stage, and to implement regional, interregional and national projects by differentiating their respective roles and characters. We also support the recommendation of the report for issuing guidance on the procurement of equipment.
 
We hope that the OIOS will continue to play an important role in enhancing accountability and transparency of the IAEA TC activities and look forward to the Country-Level Evaluation and Audit for  Europe and Central Asia next year.
 
With these comments, Japan takes note of this year’s OIOS Evaluation Report as contained in document GOV/2024/59.

Thank you, Chair.