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

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