Health sector has increasingly played a critical role in global trends of development assistance toward focusing human-centered development and poverty reduction, sharing common goals such as `Millennium Development Goals', and expanding sector-wide approaches and donor harmonization. Japan has contributed to the developing world as the top or leading donor over a decade, and has extensively committed itself to health-sector assistance. In particular, Japan has announced commitments to fighting some of the global health issues through the Global Issues Initiative on Population and AIDS, the Global Parasite Control for the 21st Century known as Hashimoto Initiative, and the Okinawa Infectious Diseases Initiative. However, to increase efficiency and effectiveness, and world's proper appreciation of Japan's development assistance for health, some challenges should be tackled, including priority settings in issues and approaches, more strategic collaboration/coordination with overseas and Japanese development partners, and human resources development and retention in Japan.

Little is studied about traditional healers‘ perceptions toward and practice of uvulectomy, which is known as a traditional surgical practice mainly in Africa and which sometimes results in severe complications. This study aimed to clarify the perceptions toward and practice of uvulectomy and the other traditional healing practices of traditional healers in a Congolese refugee camp in Tanzania. Interviews were conducted with 149 traditional healers, comprised of 59 registered, 68 non-registered and 22 faith healers. A total of 1.7% of the registered healers and 8.8% of the non-registered healers had ever conducted uvulectomy on children (a median of 2 months to a median of 3 years of age) and had received cash or domestic fowls equivalent to US$1-3 per operation. Although over 80% of the respondents believed traditional treatments to be more effective than modern medicine, less than 20% considered uvulectomy beneficial and in fact about 40% considered it to be harmful. The respondents raised cough, vomiting, appetite loss and other symptoms as an indication for uvulectomy, and death, bleeding, throat pain and other symptoms as harmful effects associated with uvulectomy. In this camp, the healers also performed other surgical procedures, such as male and female circumcision, tattoos and scarification. In conclusion, only a limited number of the traditional healers believed that uvulectomy is beneficial and performed it on infants and young children, and these were mainly non-registered healers who had relatively little collaboration with modern health professionals. In refugee settings where modern health professionals might not be familiar with traditional healing, it is considered crucial to assess the risks of ongoing traditional practices and to strive to achieve more strategic communication between modern and traditional health providers.