A Case Study on Villagers�� Participation and Project Achievement in Rural Development- Focusing on Saemaul Undong Project in Myanmar -

Since the Republic of Korea had been registered as the 24th member of OECD DAC in 2009, recent trend of Korea’s ODA has showed drastic increase including agriculture and rural development sector. Particularly, various rural development projects have been implemented adopting development experience and methodology of Saemaul Undong (SMU, New Village Movement). This study implemented statistical analysis between villagers’ participation and achievement of rural community development project, based on practical data out of ‘Saemaul Undong Project in Myanmar’, to suggest meaningful implication in terms of participatory rural development. It emphasized the importance and necessity of villagers’ participation in rural development through regression analysis that proved positive correlation between villagers’ participation and rural development project. It proves that income-generation part has significantly greater influence than capacity-building and living environment part in terms of rural community development project: Based on the analysis, comparing impact of each independent variable, income generation has 1.88 and 1.68 times greater impact than capacity-building and living environment respectively. The result, on the other side, rather raise the importance of careful consideration for project design and implementation to harmonize those three parts altogether especially rural development for developing countries: capacity-building and living environment parts suggests essential foundation to make income generation successful that enables to secure project achievement and sustainability.