Korea’s Saemaul Undong (New Village Movement): A Model for Rural Development in Ethiopia?

Abstract

Korea’s integrated rural development model, which was mainly implemented through community-based development initiative known as Saemaul Ungong (SMU), has been largely successful in bringing about an unprecedented success in the transformation of the country’s rural areas and the overall economy. Ethiopia, on the other hand, has been implementing various development programs that have set agricultural and rural development as priority since early 1990s. Even though there has been significant progress in the last decade, as a result, the country is still far from achieving the level of transformation envisaged in these programs. To this end, there are crucial lessons to draw from successful rural development models such as Saemaul Undong. The paper has examined the factors underlying the success of such a development approach along with a review of the rural development situation in Ethiopia. Given the high priority accorded to the Ethiopian agricultural and rural sector, and the largely similar enabling conditions in Ethiopia now and Korea back in the 1970s, the paper argues that Ethiopia’s rural development program, could be made to work better if the ideals of SMU can be carefully adapted to the existing gaps in the current programs. In particular, the paper has highlighted that the factors that have been key for the success of SMU in Korea such as land reform; social ties among villagers; strong institutional support; strong leadership and political commitment on the part of government; and promotion of ownership and empowerment of rural communities could be judiciously incorporated into the Ethiopian rural development strategies to attain similar results. Restructuring of the existing rural infrastructural programs and incentive system in favor of these programs and introduction of a piloting schemes in selected villages are required as a precondition to achieve such results.