**1. Introduction**

This chapter focuses on how Japan has supported industrial human resource development in developing countries. The Government of Japan has provided official development assistance (ODA) for technical and vocational education and training (TVET) since the end of the 1950s. Meanwhile, Japanese private businesses have also

contributed significantly to cultivating skilled workforces in developing countries, as most trained people work for Japanese enterprises. This chapter traces the trends and motivations of Japanese cooperation for industrial human resource development driven by the government and by the private sector, respectively.

For government-led cooperation, we focus specifically on technical cooperation by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA); for many years, the organization was mainly responsible for implementing ODA projects. For private sector-led cooperation, we focus on the Association for Overseas Technical Cooperation and Sustainable Partnerships (AOTS), an organization to promote public-private partnerships in training. AOTS is Japan's largest private-sector organization for technical cooperation and has provided training and dispatched experts to developing countries. It was established in 1959 with the approval of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) to meet the private sector's training needs. In this chapter, we examine two programs that are government-subsidized but implemented by the AOTS: the technical training programs and the management training programs. To participate in these programs, private businesses must send applications to AOTS and share the training costs. AOTS also implements programs on behalf of other governmental organizations,1 but since these programs are not unique to AOTS, this chapter does not cover them.
