North Korean Economy Watch

Institute for Far Eastern Studies (IFES)
NK Brief No. 10-09-07-1
9/7/2010

Construction on a day-care center for the children of North Korean workers in the Kaesong Industrial Complex (KIC) has been completed, and the center was opened on September 1. The ROK Ministry of Unification released a statement announcing that “a child-care center has been built with the aim of providing care for the children of North Korean female laborers in the KIC and to improve productivity of the industries in the complex.” With the opening of the new center, more than 300 additional children can be cared for, along with the more than 200 children that are currently attending day-care in the complex.

Ground broke on the new facility, with over 3,100 square meters of floorspace, on September 24, 2009, and it took over a year to complete. The real estate was provided by the North, with the South-North Cooperation Fund providing 900 million won for the build. The Kaesong Industrial District Management Committee has turned over the management of the center to the North, and factories in the complex pay approximately fifteen dollars per child per month to send employees’ children to day-care.

In addition, the Kaesong Industrial District Management Committee and the North Korean Central Special Zone Development Guidance General Bureau agreed on August 5 to raise the minimum wage of North Korean workers in the complex by five percent, from 57.881 USD/month to 60.775 USD/month. The raise took effect on August 1 and will need to be reevaluated before July 31, 2011.

Along with the five percent raise in the minimum wage, South Korean companies will gain more control over the hiring process. North and South Korean authorities agreed to strengthen adherence to existing regulations, both on hiring and assigning workers to various positions. Previously, North Korean labor representatives could control work assignments for North Korean workers, but that will be falling under the authority of managers of each business.

According to the guidelines regulating the KIC, North Korean workers will receive a raise of no more than five percent per year, and they have received a five percent raise each year since 2007. North and South have now agreed to continue raises at a rate palatable to businesses in the complex, and to allow South Korean businesses more control over employees.

According to Fox News:

As the xenophobic North Korean regime of Kim Jong Il appears to be inching toward a murky transition of power, the United Nations is laying plans to spend more than $290 million on a welter of programs in the communist state—including a scheme to produce an algae sold in the U.S. as tropical fish food–provided someone else comes up with much of the money.

The money is by no means a sure thing, especially if the unpredictable North Korean dictator rejects any of the stringent oversight conditions attached to money from some of the important donors the U.N. hopes will chip in.

The U.N. plans, however, demonstrate the determination of the world organization and its most influential backers—notably, the U.S. government, which is the biggest single financial supporter of most U.N. aid and development organizations– to keep dangling carrots of assistance before the North Korean regime, even at its most provocative.

The U.N. plans persist despite such incidents as the March 26 sinking of a South Korean warship, the Cheonan, most likely by a North Korean submarine, and the regime’s continued nuclear saber-rattling, especially toward South Korea. Just last month, for example, North Korea threatened a “powerful nuclear deterrence” in response to a joint U.S.-South Korean antisubmarine exercise prompted by the Cheonan incident.

All those uncertainties fade, however, alongside a bigger one: rumors that the ailing and reclusive Kim, who returned on Sunday from his second trip to China in three months, hopes to install his youngest son, Kim Jong-Un, as his successor– a process that could already be well under way.

Whatever the outcome of the succession process, at least a dozen U.N. agencies and offices clearly hope to be deeply involved over the next five years in North Korea’s national welfare, in areas ranging from health care and education to sanitation and civil service training, “strengthening knowledge networks” in agriculture, alternate energy development, and transportation, not to mention improving North Korean export trade.

A significant number of the efforts will also go to bolstering the capabilities of the North Korean government, which is not surprising, since they are prepared in close collaboration with various departments of the ruling apparatus. These efforts include a strong focus on health care delivery and education (already problematic in a totalitarian state burdened with a smothering cult of the personality).

But they also include more ambiguous activities in a brutal and thorough-going dictatorship such as North Korea. Among them: coordinating “national knowledge networks and practices,” “management and specialist training,” and—in a country that regularly threatens its neighbors with nuclear and conventional war—a “disaster preparedness and response strategy” spurred by North Korea’s famines and floods. All of these activities are depicted by the U.N. documents as being strictly humanitarian in nature.

The array of plans is laid out in schematic form in a 22-page “United Nations Strategic Framework Results Matrix” for North Korea, which is being presented to members of the supervisory Executive Board of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the U.N.’s principal development coordinating agency, at a meeting in New York this week.

Click here for the matrix.

The framework is buttressed by UNDP’s own country program for North Korea, which is a $38.3 million portion of the larger total. Both documents cover the period from 2011 to 2015.

Click here for the UNDP Country Program.

The UNDP contribution is noteworthy, among other things, for the fact that most of the money–$34 million—can be counted on to exist. That amount is described in the annex to the country program as coming from “regular” UNDP resources, meaning its core budget. Only $4 million of UNDP’s spending in North Korea comes from other contributions.

A UNDP spokesman underlined—as does the country program—the extent to which UNDP claims to be adhering to newly strengthened safeguards in relation to its North Korean program.

UNDP activities in North Korea exploded into scandal in 2007, leading to suspension of its program until 2009. Among other things, an independent investigative panel subsequently determined that UNDP had wrongfully provided millions in hard currency to the North Korean regime, ignored U.N. Security Council sanctions in passing on dual-use equipment that could conceivably be used in the country’s nuclear program, and allowed North Korean government employees to fill key positions.

In the current program, UNDP emphasizes that it has revamped its hiring and currency policies, but adds that “a proper monitoring and evaluation plan is necessary to ensure accountability and transparency in project implementation.” The careful wording indicates that at least some of that planning remains to be done.

While UNDP has actual cash to spend, however, nearly $119 million of some $128 million that UNICEF plans to spend in North Korea over the next four years—about 93 per cent—is expected to come from outside donors, according to UNICEF’s own country plan for North Korea. That is, as UNICEF delicately puts it, “subject to the availability of specific purpose contributions” from those willing to put up the money.

Click here for the UNICEF Country Program.

Much of that volunteer UNICEF money would go toward building up North Korea’s grievously neglected clinical health care facilities, bolstering maternal and early childhood care, early childhood education and large-scale vaccination and medication campaigns to fight AIDs, malaria and tuberculosis.

Most of the anti-disease money is supposed to come from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM), a Geneva-based institution financed in part of Microsoft Found Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda. Nowadays, the U.S. government contributes 28 percent of the GFATM’s funds.

And so far, GFATM has only handed over $12.45 million to UNICEF, according to the U.N. agency’s spokesman, Chris de Bono, for its anti-malarial and TV campaign. (According to GFATM’s website, UNICEF has received $18.35 million, out of about $31.5 million approved so far.) According to de Bono, another $56 million is due to come from GFATM starting in 2013, provided a “number of conditions” laid down by the Global Fund are met.

Those conditions, according to Global Fund communications director Jon Liden, largely bear on whether the money is meaning the health goals set by the donors. Among them, for example, is a commitment to cut in half the North Korean death rate from malaria by 2013, using the death rate in 2007 as a baseline (0.31 per 1,000 people, vs. 0.62.).

Click here for Global Fund report on North Korea.

Failure to meet the targets could result in reduced funding for the next three years, or a cutoff.

The additional “other” revenues required by UNICEF for 2011-2015 will be raised “as we get into our program,” according to spokesman De Bono, “as is our usual practice.”

The same apparently applies to the bulk of $101 million or so to be spent in North Korea by the World Health Organization (WHO). WHO activities include supporting UNICEF on the malaria and TB campaigns, but also building up North Korean health care, supplying equipment and drugs, and helping institute telemedicine.

But WHO’s own “country cooperation strategy” for North Korea extends only to 2013, meaning all of its fundraising plans for the 2011-2015 have not yet been written.

In the current strategy document, completed in 2009, WHO notes that it will need to use about $3 million of its regular budget and mobilize $20 million annually from voluntary contributions to meet North Koreas needs. This, the document says, “will be a challenging task.”

Just how challenging, perhaps, can be seen in the case of the struggling World Food Program (WFP), whose efforts are outlined in the U.N. Strategic Framework as trying to provide “fortified locally produced nutritious foods” to young children.

In fact, WFP has been running a dwindling operation to provide emergency food to many more of North Korea’s desperately hungry population. But donors stampeded away from the WFP fundraising effort, especially after the Kim regime detonated a nuclear device last year, and questions were raised about whether the government was profiting from the food effort.

Questioned Raised About Who Profits From Aid to North Korea

Currently, WFP has dialed back the goal of its emergency food aid operation from $500 million in 2008-2009 to $91 million.

In the 2011-2015 strategic framework, UNDP and the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization will be working on amplifying North Korea’s meager food supply, enhancing, among other things, areas where “double-cropping” is possible, and adding to fruit orchards and livestock herds. UNDP’s project documents say it will spend $13 million on “seed production in alternative cereals” –defined as wheat, barley, soybeans, potatoes—as well as “wild fruit processing and protein-rich production.”

Some of UNDP’s protein projects, however, seem decidedly outside the mainstream, or even bizarre. In its program document, for example, UNDP says it will “support pilot production of protein-rich plans, such as spirulina and pistia statiotes, which will supply nutrients.”

Spirulina is an algae that has gained a reputation in alternative food circles as a diet supplement. In the U.S., health food websites offer a powdered form for anywhere from $24 to $33 per pound—hardly a cheap source of protein for starving people. It is also sold in the U.S. as tropical fish food. But whether North Korea needs a “pilot project” to produce spirulina is debatable.

As far back as October, 2003, a North Korean news agency declared that the Kim government’s botanical institute had, “after years of researches [sic] completed the method of artificially cultivating spirulina at low cost.” The agency added, “It can be cultivated easily in greenhouses too.” Indeed, spirulina is currently listed as a marketable product on a North Korean export website. And on Aug. 6, a Chinese news agency announced that North Korean researchers had created a new spirulina vaccination “which prevents and treats domestic animals’ diseases and increases their weight.” Whether there was any independent verification of that claim was not mentioned in the news article.

As for pistia statiotes, also known as water lettuce, according to the website of the Center for Aquatic and Invasive Plants at the University of Florida, the floating plant is a fast-growing weed, which can block waterways, deplete oxygen supplies in water, and threaten fish populations. It is described as an obnoxious invader in West Africa and Australia. While pistia can survive in temperate climates, it abhors cold and thrives mainly in tropical and semi-tropical environments—not exactly what North Korea is known for.

One of the few places where it is cultivated for its nutritional value is apparently southern China, where it is sometimes used as a supplemental carp food.

In a country full of starving or semi-starving people, of course, almost anything may be viewed as edible. But in the U.N.’s renewed desire to pour money into North Korea, the value of at least some of the projects it is pushing for approval may be hard to swallow.

Read the full story here:
U.N. Lays Plans to Spend $290M on Aid to North Korea
Fox News
George Russell
9/1/2010

According to Luke Hutchison at Choson Exchange:

Choson Exchange is committed to providing educational materials from the world’s best educational institutions to North Korean students free of charge. This goal is made possible through the OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative, in which dozens of top universities all around the world have chosen to post a large number of course materials such as lecture videos, lecture notes, handouts and assignments on the Internet under the Creative Commons open access license. This license gives people all over the world the ability to obtain a top-quality education for free, and gives professors the ability to legally reuse these materials and incorporate them into their own teaching.

Several other sources of top-quality educational materials are also available under Creative Commons licenses, such as lectures on a wide array of topics in mathematics, economics and finance from the Khan Academy, full high-quality textbooks on WikiBooks.org and encyclopedic content on Wikipedia.org. Recently, WikiBooks and Wikipedia added the ability to select sets of articles and have them assembled into a PDF format e-book for downloading, or these books can be easily printed, bound and shipped with a few mouse clicks through a company called Pedia Press. This provides an easy method for creation of high-quality printed textbooks or e-books that meet the content and pedagogical requirements of our North Korean colleagues.

Choson Exchange has been invited to present Open CourseWare content and e-books at the Pyongyang International Science and Technology Book Fair (PISTBF) in September 2010. The initial content that we will take to North Korea includes both OCW and Wikipedia/WikiBooks-sourced material in the subject areas of business, economics and finance; basic sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology; medicine, including first aid, physiology and gynaecology; computer science and engineering. We plan to bring both electronic copies of lecture videos and lecture notes as well as printed copies of some WikiBooks to use in exhibitions in Pyongyang and training programs.

The quality of many of the materials available through Creative Commons sources is very high. However no educational program can stand on the strength of the educational materials alone, there is a lot of structure and that has to be put in place for an educational program to succeed. For this reason, Choson Exchange is also committed to helping create and support the teaching infrastructure necessary to effectively kickstart training courses incorporating open content. To accomplish this, foreign advisors who are expert in each teaching area are being recruited to assist in helping their North Korean counterparts get up to speed with teaching the new academic material. We are confident this is the fastest way to improve the quality of education, and that improving education will improve quality of life and the level of wellbeing of the country.

Finally, North Korea is unprecedented in its culture and rich history. As we work with our North Korean colleagues to bring the highest quality Creative Commons academic materials from the best educational institutions to North Korea and help them to build programs that employ these resources, we would also like to work with them, if they choose, to contribute North Korean literature, cultural and academic course materials back into the body of Open CourseWare, so that the world can learn about the North Korean story directly from North Koreans themselves. This will add to the richness of the cultural tapestry that is the Creative Commons.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education:

North Korea’s red, white, and blue flag flutters on the campus, signs are written in Hangul, and female students stroll through the corridors wearing the traditional jeogori costume. Professors lecture beneath iconic portraits of the father-and-son hereditary dictatorship that has run the reclusive Stalinist state since 1948.

Roughly 800 miles from P’yongyang in Tokyo’s leafy western suburbs, Korea University is an anomaly, an intellectual oasis in a society that distrusts and even despises the ethnic group it caters to—native Koreans loyal to P’yongyang. The institution has never received financial support or even official recognition from the government of Japan.

The university is part of a network of educational institutions established decades ago to serve the Korean population here. Its students wrestle with politics and computer science but also the philosophy of the North’s leader, Kim Jong-il, and the merits of their isolated country’s fossilized centralized government. Surrounded by one of the planet’s most high-tech cities, undergraduates spend their entire four years in Spartan on-campus dorms designed to encourage shared collective identity.

“Part of what we do here is protect our culture,” said the institution’s president, Chang Byong-tai. “Our country and our identity were stolen from us by Japan.”

While unusual, the university for the most part resembles other higher-education institutions, with some notable exceptions. A tour reveals a quiet campus, with aspiring teachers taking a music lesson and students reading in the library, where yellowed English-language newspapers from P’yongyang sat on shelves.

The university offers a standard range of courses, including languages, history, economics, and hard sciences, and has carved out a niche offering legal and other specialist qualifications to Koreans. It has become an academic pit stop for Korean students on their way to Japanese graduate universities.

Set up in 1956, the university is struggling to survive. Hit hard by the decline in Japan’s Korean population, enrollment has plummeted to just 800 students, down from 1,500 in the mid-1990s. Student fees pay for 70 percent of the institution’s costs; donations and endowment investment earnings pay for the rest. Cash from P’yongyang, once a lifeline, has dried up to a thin, unreliable trickle.

“We’re very worried about the future,” said Mr. Chang.

A Political Punching Bag

Mostly left alone for decades by Japan’s authorities, the institution—like any with connections to North Korea here—has recently become a political punching bag. Ultrarightists have driven up this quiet cul-de-sac and blasted the campus with anti-P’yongyang slogans from loudspeakers. Political conservatives have zeroed in on the roughly 70 P’yongyang-affiliated Korean schools that feed the university, demanding they be excluded from a new tuition-waiver system.

“The atmosphere now is very, very bad,” said Kim Yang-Sun, an administrator at the university. Like most of the staff here, Mr. Kim resents the recent attention, which comes on the back of growing tensions between Tokyo and P’yongyang and what he sees as unfair long-term treatment by the Japanese authorities. “Donations to universities are tax deductible in other parts of the world, but not for us. We have been discriminated against.”

Mr. Kim’s ancestors have been in Japan since its annexation of the Korean peninsula in 1910. When occupation ended in 1945, about 700,000 Koreans stayed on rather than return to their homeland, which was then sliding into a war that would eventually split the country into two bitterly opposed states.

These refugees were rendered stateless when Japan’s postwar government ended the citizenship of former colonial subjects in 1947. Well-documented discrimination meant that many found the typical postwar route to prosperity in Japan—lifetime employment in large companies—effectively barred.

When Tokyo normalized relations with South Korea in 1965, Koreans in Japan had to choose essentially an administrative category—to opt for life as a South Korean with permanent residency or to leave the word “Korean” on their alien-registration cards and so become de facto North Koreans. Most declined South Korean citizenship—ironic given that the vast majority originates from the geographic south. South Korea was then a poor dictatorship backed by the United States, while North Korea, though offering little freedom, at least boasted the rhetoric of a “workers’ state.”

“Koreans in Japan were very poor and had no civil rights, so it was a big deal that there was a nation that regarded them as fellow compatriots, that gave them help, and funded this university,” said Sonia Ryang, a professor of anthropology and director of the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Iowa.

Today at the university, the grandchildren of those first-generation Koreans struggle with profound identity issues. Many distrust the Kim Jong-il regime but remain loyal out of respect for their parents or the desire to preserve their cultural heritage.

“The reputation of the university is less important that what we study here,” said Ho Tae-jung, a political-economy student. “I’m a Korean, and I want to protect my culture, language, and identity. That’s why my parents and I chose this place.”

Said Ms. Ryang: “They do an amazing job of maintaining Korean culture in a hostile environment.”

Those familiar with the university say one of its unofficial roles is to act as an ethnic matchmaking service. “Most of us want to marry a Korean and have Korean children,” said Yun Minna, a third-year law and politics student at the college.

“I don’t hate Japan, but when you see how our community is getting smaller, it would be better to marry a Korean,” said Mr. Ho.

‘Education Gives Us Pride’

But many Japanese view the community and the college with mistrust since the 2002 revelation that the North Korean military had been kidnapping Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 80s in a bizarre plot to train spies. News-media interest, often prurient, has grown as relations have deteriorated with P’yongyang, which recently became a nuclear power. For conservatives, the university and the rest of North Korean network in Japan are a sort of Trojan horse, breeding disloyalty and even incubating spies. Students and graduates respond that they are the victims of McCarthy-style persecution.

“I don’t talk anymore to the Japanese media because I’m sick and tired of how they portray us,” said Chung Hyon Suk, a graduate of the university who now supervises press events at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan. Like most students who have graduated from the university, she says there are huge misconceptions about what goes on there. “Students discuss Marx and Lenin, of course, but they can talk very freely and criticize the [P’yongyang] government. A lot of us feel inferior, so education helped give us pride as Koreans, in our language and culture.”

Said Ms. Ryang, who is also a graduate of the university: “Depending on the occasion, students felt free to make jokes about North Korea, but by the same token, again depending on the occasion, students were able to conform with university orthodoxy, upholding North Korea as their glorious fatherland.”

With over 10,000 Koreans a year either assuming Japanese citizenship or swapping their affiliation to South Korea, according to Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the minority community served by the university is shrinking, from a peak of 700,000 to just over 400,000. Many parents are sending their children to Japanese schools. For some, that’s an opportunity to bury the past completely and scrap their Korean names and identities.

“We have heard cases of schoolchildren finding photographs of their grandparents wearing Korean dress and being astonished at this background,” said Moogwi Kim, of the Korean Youth Association in Japan. “Their parents kept it from them.”

Mr. Chang, the university’s president, believes that government recognition as a foreign university, which is currently afforded very few Japanese universities, and allowing donations to be tax deductible might help his institution survive.

Ms. Ryang, however, wonders if the university would really welcome recognition by the government. “If it were recognized, it would have to receive periodic inspections, comply with certain levels of transparency, and it has no experience of that.”

She said few people understand how isolated the community and the university felt. “Japan is not a violently segregated community; it’s politely segregated. Until 1981 we were not able to travel outside Japan. I never had Japanese friends when I was a kid. That’s changing now, and the university is within reach of globalization, but is it ready for that?”

Read the full story here:
In Japan, a North Korean Campus Keeps National Identity Alive
Chronicle of Higher Education
David McNeill
8/3/2010

Barbara Demick wrote an interesting piece in the New Yorker this week which captures first-hand stories about how the DPRK’s currency reform affected local families (not well).

Here is her article in PDF format.

Daily NK
Min Cho Hee
6/7/2010

On June 6, 1946, the Chosun Children’s Union was founded. The Children’s Union, an organization for all children between seven and fourteen, is guided politically by the Science Education Department of the Central Committee of the Party.

Its hierarchical structure consists of a number of levels populated by students, including section committees of class and school, provincial and local school committees, and the national coalition of the Children’s Union. Within the structure, there is one head and two vice-heads of the Union in each school, one school committee member from each classroom, one head and two vice-heads of a section committee which exists within each class, and three to five committee members of each section committee.

The teacher who takes responsibility for the Children’s Union in a school is known as the Children’s Union Instructor, while the homeroom teacher of each class is generally also the section committee instructor. Based on the notion that a student’s political and organization life should be divided from his or her general school life, the teacher undertakes homeroom tasks and Children’s Union tasks under two different official positions.

Members of the Children’s Union must act according to the “regulations and obligations of the Chosun Children’s Union.” In order to “do good works,” part of the social activities of the Union, Union members make a “Kid’s Plan,” which specifies the kind and scale of the activities the member intends to carry out, be it collecting scrap iron, copper or paper, raising rabbits, participating in propaganda choirs or being a children’s watch guard (someone who monitors the activities of other students).

The symbols of the Children’s Union are the red scarf, like that of Young Pioneer organizations in other communist states, a badge showing a torch, and the greeting and slogan of the Union, “Let’s always be ready to become workers in the construction of socialism!” in long form, or, more pithily, “Always ready!”

Every student has to take part in one of three Union entrance ceremonies during their second year of elementary school.

The first entrance ceremony is held on Kim Jong Il’s birthday, February 16, the second on Kim Il Sung’s birthday on April 15, and the last one on June 6, the date of the organization’s founding. Model students who have a good family background can join the Union on Kim Jong Il’s birthday with his or her homeroom teacher’s recommendation, the next political class of students enter it on April 15 and the rest of students joint en masse on June 6th.

Entrance ceremonies are held regionally. First on the agenda at the ceremony is to recite the entrance oath; next, Union officials give badges and ties to new members; then the children shout the Union slogan with right arm aloft in salute.

The main concern of parents is the day of their child’s entrance ceremony. Students who are permitted to join on Kim Jong Il’s birthday have the best prospects, with a high possibility of becoming Union leaders of one kind or another. Activities within the Union are, of course, noted, so it is important to be successful from the beginning.

Therefore, the position of homeroom teacher of a second-year elementary class is desirable, since it allows the teacher access to bribes of money, clothes, rice and more from parents keen to see their child enter the Union on February 16.

Until the early 1990s, when the authorities stopped provided students with school uniforms, the red scarf was also provided by the state, but now, as with so much, it is the duty of parents.

Therefore, from February to June demand for the ubiquitous red scarf of the Children’s Union increases in North Korean markets. In the Sunam market in Chonjin, the red scarf of the Union sells for between 500 and 1200 won.

Yet even in the simple red scarf there is a symbol of inequality. Children from the upper classes have silk scarves manufactured in China, while the other students use cheap nylon versions or receive them from siblings.

According to Yonhap:

A group of South Korean archaeologists returned home Tuesday after ending a months-long joint excavation of an ancient palace in North Korea, a Unification Ministry official here said.

The 11 archaeologists had teamed up with their North Korean counterparts since March to excavate the remains of Manwoldae, a royal palace of the Goryeo Kingdom (918-1392), in the North Korean border town of Kaesong.

The group decided to return about three weeks earlier than scheduled because enough progress was made, ministry spokesman Chun Hae-sung said, dismissing speculation that rising tension on the peninsula forced them to come back.

The results of the excavation will be announced in a seminar later this year, he said. The palace was built over a century ago, and only the ruins of its foundations exist today.

Here is a satellite image of Manwoldae Palace.

Read the full story here:
S. Korea archaeologists return after excavating ancient palace in N. Korea
Yonhap
Sam Kim
5/18/2010

According to the Guardian Jobs web page:

Exciting opportunities in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea)

Employer: BRITISH COUNCIL
Posted: 06 May 2010
Reference: OA10002
Location: Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea)
Industry:  Charities – International, Education – TEFL, General – General
Hours: Full Time
Salary: £26,880 – £30,624

Exciting opportunities in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea)

In-country Project Leader – £30,624

English Curriculum/Materials Developer/Trainer – £26,880

English Trainer – £26,880

Contract from August 2010 to August 2011 (with the possibility of extension to March 2012)

Benefits including free accommodation, pension provision, medical insurance and mid-contract flights to Beijing and the UK

The British Council is the United Kingdom’s international organisation for educational opportunities and cultural relations. Our purpose is to build mutually beneficial relationships between people in the UK and other countries and increase appreciation for the UK’s creative ideas and achievements. We operate in 110 countries and territories worldwide.

The British Council/Foreign and Commonwealth Office English language project in the DPRK aims to deliver quality programmes in teacher/trainer training and to develop the curriculum and related materials as well as assessment systems at three leading institutions in Pyongyang. This high-profile project has been running since 2000, and we are now seeking three experienced English language teaching professionals to fill the above posts, which will be based at these institutions.

For all posts you will have: a diploma level qualification in TEFL (eg UCLES DTEFLA/Cambridge ESOL DELTA, Trinity College London Dip TESOL); a minimum of 3 years’ ELT and teacher training experience overseas; and experience of curriculum planning; and of materials development. It is desirable that you have experience of working in a ‘hardship’ environment.

Additionally:

English Trainer: will have experience of developing English assessments.

English Curriculum/Materials Developer/Trainer: it is desirable that you have experience of constructing English tests and of running CELTA/Trinity Certificate type courses.

In-country Project Leader post: will have experience of testing. It is desirable that you have an MA in Applied Linguistics (or equivalent); people and project management; teaching British Studies; English for specific purposes (ESP); and content and language integrated learning (CLIL).

Note: local restrictions mean that UK passport holders only can be considered for this post. This is an unaccompanied post, although in exceptional cases the DPRK authorities might agree to an accompanying spouse. Employment is subject to permission from the DPRK Ministries of Education and Foreign Affairs.

Closing date for applications: 12 noon, Monday 24 May 2010. Applications should be returned by e-mail.

For more information and an application pack, please visit: www.britishcouncil.org/new/about-us/working-with-us/current-vacancies or e-mail (quoting OA10002): OAS.vacancies@britishcouncil.org.

According to Yonhap:

The first accredited high school opened Tuesday for North Korean students who have settled in South Korea.

Yeomyung, established in central Seoul in 2004, used to provide schooling for older aged students whose families had defected from the North. Graduates had to pass state qualification exams in order to receive high school diplomas since it was not a formally accredited institution.

The number of North Korean students was 1,478 at the end of last year, according to government data, with 77 percent of them are enrolled in regular schools. Yeomyung currently has 32 students enrolled in its high school course.

“We will provide full support to see that North Korean adolescents who receive education at alternative schools or private facilities become sound citizens,” Education Minister Ahn Byong-man said at the opening ceremony.

Read the full sotry here:
Alternative school for N. Korean students opens in Seoul
Yonhap
4/20/2010

Daily NK
Yoo Gwan Hee
4/5/2010

In North Korea, April 1st is commemorated as “Tax Abolition Day.” Ever since the law, “On Completely Abolishing Taxes,” was ratified through the Supreme People’s Assembly on March 21, 1974, North Korea has claimed both within and without to be the only country in the world that does not collect taxes. However, their claim is only for propaganda purposes, for North Koreans labor under a list of state-imposed taxes and duties which grows longer day by day.

Take the example of electricity. Power distribution center members in every city and town visit households in their region alongside the chairperson of the local People’s Unit, whereupon they collect electricity payments according to the number of electric bulbs and electronic equipment therein. This process is done quarterly. In the late 1990s, the quarterly electricity bill per household in Pyongyang was about 20 won. To reduce costs, of course there were people who removed electric bulbs and hid electronic equipment such as irons whenever the power distribution center had workers in their neighborhood.

Since the 2002 economic management reforms were announced on July 1, however, electricity bills have increased greatly. For families living in luxurious apartments in the Jung-district of Pyongyang with televisions, refrigerators and electric fans, households pay as much as 800 or 900 won per quarter.

After the so-called July 1 Reform Measure, troubles between the power distribution center and the people increased. The North Korean people were understandably displeased with the power distribution center, for it was trying to collect money for a utility whose availability was and remains far from regular.

Next, let’s look at reserve food and organizational expenses. North Korea has nine levels of food distribution. From 100g to 900g is supposed to be distributed per day depending on the level, but for the purpose of stocking up reserves, up to 100g is collected from the people instead. Additionally, people are forced to submit approximately two percent of their salary for organizational expenses.

Next, to support for the construction of historical sites. North Korea emphasizes the “voluntary participation” of the North Korean people under the Party apparatus and workers’ organizations. Construction of historical sites for the idolization of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il is frequently organized. Also, officials often collect money from people in order to support those construction projects of which the cabinet is in charge.

Then there is free education. It is officially called “free education,” but school administration expenses are all covered by students and parents. Students have to collect waste paper, waste iron and waste rubber, or raise rabbits and submit the pelts to school. After 2000, there have even been students engaging in business around markets in order to provide supplies for submission to the school.

Onwards, then, to market stands rental fees. After the July 1 Reform Measure, the amount of tax collected at markets suddenly increased. Market stand rental fees already existed before the July 1 Reform Measure but, after 2002, market management centers started collecting market management tax as well, basing it on each product sold. Noodle sellers paid ten won per day, while soybean curd sellers paid three won.

Market stand rental fees became more systematic as well after general markets opened in late 2003. According to the product being sold and daily sales figures, market management centers charged rental fees. In present-day Nammun Market, Hoiryeong, the stand rental fee is said to have been fixed at 100 won per month.

Separate from the stand rental fee, monthly tax is charged on products for sale in the markets. For example, Nammun merchants pay additional taxes of 300 won for industrial goods, 180 won for pork, 150 for cigarettes, alcoholic drinks and fish, 120 won for food and 100 won for general merchandise.

So, while the North Korean media deliver their diet of propaganda promoting North Korea as the world’s only taxless country, be wise to the reality of the North Korean people suffering under an increasing tax burden.