Greetings from the Host Institution Representatives

The JICA-KIRIN Fellowship is a program operated in cooperation with Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), Kirin Holdings Company, Limited and the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO).
The following messages from the host institution representatives present the significance of this program.

Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA)

It is a great honor for JICA to be a partner of the Kirin Holdings Company’s Fellowship Program since 2017, a program which has continued for last three decades.

Japan has welcomed approximately 370,000 trainees from all over the world for the last 60 years since it began providing Official Development Assistance (ODA) in 1954. JICA launched the JICA Development Studies Program in 2018, a year which celebrates the 150th anniversary of the Meiji Modernization. The Program invites future leaders from partner countries to Japan, and offers them the opportunity to learn about Japan’s modernization and development experiences, which differ from those of Europe and the U.S., and its wisdom as a country that provided cooperation toward the progress of developing countries after World War II. In the field of agriculture and rural development, JICA is aiming to invite 1,000 students from partner countries to study in Japan over the course of ten years from fiscal year 2020, supporting the human resource development in these countries.

Through this Fellowship Program, JICA is looking forward to working closely with Kirin Holdings Company to contribute to the development of partner countries, by leveraging our knowledge and experiences, including Kirin Holdings Company and the partners’ long history in supporting food science researchers from Asian countries, as well as JICA’s experience and networks built over the years.

As part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted at the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit, food security and improved nutrition were underlined as one of the goals to be achieved by 2030. Achieving these goals is not only a task for developing countries but rather a call for action by all the countries and its people, and this Fellowship Program is one form of partnership to achieve these goals.

It is our hope that the promising researchers coming to Japan from Asia for this Fellowship Program will learn about Japan’s development experiences in the field of agriculture, forestry, and fisheries, while deepening their expertise. We sincerely hope the research and their stay in Japan would be fruitful and leads to future successes after their return, and we look forward to the synergies created with JICA’s activities in their home country.

Kirin Holdings Company, Limited

In 2017, Kirin Holdings Company, Limited partnered with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) to launch the JICA-KIRIN Fellowship Program to support the training of food science researchers in Asia. Since 1993, Kirin Group has been supporting the autonomous resolution of the food problem in Asia’s emerging countries through the "United Nations University-KIRIN Fellowship Program" up to 2016, followed by the “JICA-KIRIN Fellowship Program”

With this program, fellows (researchers) from Asian countries spend one year conducting research on their topic, under the supervision of the Food Research Institute (NFRI) at the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO), located in Tsukuba in Ibaraki Prefecture. In addition to producing significant results in their field of research related to food in their own countries, it is our hope that after the training period, fellows will share their learnings with researchers in their home country, build upon the network they cultivated with researchers in Japan and from emerging Asian countries during their stay, and contribute to international cooperation in the future.

I sincerely hope the fellows’ stay in Japan will be fulfilling, both in terms of their research and also their personal experience.

National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO)

The UNU-KIRIN Fellowship Program had operated for 24 years and it has been three years since the launch of the JICA-KIRIN Fellowship Program. So far, a total of 131 fellows have engaged in research at the Food Research Institute (NFRI), the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO) in Tsukuba. All the employees at NFRI are proud that a number of fellows continued their research in their home country and accomplished significant outcomes, thereby leading the research institutions in their countries.

We are profoundly grateful to Kirin Holdings Company, Limited for continuing this program, and to the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) for taking over the heart of the program and carrying on with the new JICA-KIRIN Fellowship Program.

NFRI is currently focusing on three areas of research: applying produce and food functionality, ensuring safety and accountability of food, and developing effective processing and logistic technology of food. With the world’s population continuing to grow and expected to reach nine billion soon, to provide food for such a vast population, it will be necessary to increase productivity through the development of high-yield variety of crops and improvement of cultivation techniques, as well as effectively utilize every component or every part of agricultural produce according to its characteristic. We believe such technologies will become more significant in a region such as Asia, where the population and the economy are growing exponentially. For this reason, we are honored to be able to share the knowledge of this research with the program’s fellows.

We strongly hope that this program will continue for many years to come and for further prosperity in the field of food science engineering in Asian countries.