Developing countries still have a fragile social and economic infrastructure. In this context, the demand for infrastructure in developing countries is on the rise, but the investment is concentrated in the metropolitan area and core infrastructure for industrial development, and the regional disparity between large cities and rural areas is widening.

The most realistic approach to cope with rural road development is to focus on the establishment of technical standards and development guidelines, and the dissemination of efficient maintenance and management technology in the country through technical cooperation, rather than the maintenance of nationwide facilities that cost more. In this way, infrastructure development in rural areas is often tackled mainly through technical cooperation, but even if they are collectively referred to as rural areas, they have diverse characteristics such as weather, topography, and culture. In addition, administrative agencies and management organizations are often underdeveloped, and when considering the inconvenience of transportation and procurement of materials, projects in rural areas are said to have more factors to be considered and are more complicated than those in urban areas.

This paper focuses on technical cooperation projects for rural roads, which are underdeveloped and in poor condition in the road transportation sector, which is the basic infrastructure that supports social economic activities such as agriculture and local industries, targeting developing countries where economic development is highly expected. The objective of this paper is to examine the following four elements through case analysis: (1) selection of technologies for development, (2) details of technical cooperation, (3) technology components and the process of development and dissemination, and (4) project evaluation methods.

The analytical approach indicated above clarified the appropriate methodology of development assistance for technical cooperation projects as follows. (1) the selection of technology for rural roads should be determined based on the ease of technology diffusion, social acceptability, life cycle cost, and asset management, (2) it is important to transfer and deploy three components of technology, organization, and institution as a set in the technical cooperation, (3) the process of making feedback from the field more functional is effective for the dissemination of rural road technology, and (4) the evaluation method for projects will be more effective after the termination of the project by setting the evaluation factors in advance from the viewpoint of dissemination of the technology and strengthening the organizational capacity.