DEVELOPMENT: Technical Cooperation Provides ‘Innovative Impulse’

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Ramesh Jaura

BONN, May 31 1998 (IPS) - Post-conflict reconstruction is taking on a central role in the developmental effort in many countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America, and technical cooperation is playing an increasingly important part in it.

Technical cooperation was essential to institution rebuilding, and provides the kind of “innovative impulses” — as German development policy maker Wighard Haerdtl puts it — needed to energise political, economic, social and infrastructural frameworks.

The view was shared by a number of top development figures at a symposium this week in Petersberg, near Bonn, and backed up by a new report of the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ).

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, told the Petersberg symposium, on strengthening of human rights field operations, that her office was endeavouring to strengthen programmes in advisory services and technical cooperation. These included the promotion of democratic institutions, development and human rights, women’s rights and gender issues, human rights support to parliament, constitutional assistance, human rights training, legislative reform assistance and administration of justice.

Robinson said measures were also underway in various countries, to establish or strengthen national human rights institutions, to train police and prison officials, give assistance on specific human rights issues, implement comprehensive national plans of action for the promotion and protection of human rights, and to implement of projects related to economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to development.

“The strategy is to link with partners engaged in similar programmes and indeed not to re-invent the wheel,” noted Robinson.

She referred to a World Bank meeting in Paris in April on post- conflict reconstruction, which for the first time brought together the humanitarian, development and human rights institutions as well as major bilateral and multilateral donors.

They discussed ways and means of developing more effective strategies to deal with the aftermath of conflict as well as to address the root causes of humanitarian crises. It was decided to set up an informal network which, Robinson hopes, will pave the way to greater coordination at ground level in reconstruction efforts.

Haerdtl, a state secretary (deputy minister) in the BMZ, who heads the board supervising the GTZ activities, says technical cooperation has become significant in a rapidly globalising and interdependent world, characterised by rising world population, a growing number of refugees and migrants affected by non- international wars and environmental destruction.

“All these issues have assumed global dimensions,” he says. “At the same time, it is obvious that political and economic crises can hardly be limited to a region immediately affected by them.”

It is just this fact which lends great significance to development cooperation in general and technical cooperation in particular. Haerdtl argues that technical cooperation provides “innovative impulses” to the improvement of political, economic, social and infrastructural framework conditions.

A case in point, he says in an introduction to the just published GTZ 1997 report, is the assistance being provided in building up democratic structures and relevant political frameworks. These cover countries ranging from Cambodia and the states of central and eastern Europe through to China and South Africa.

Gerold Dieke, one of the three directors general of the GTZ says the agency is being increasingly tasked by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) and the European Commission to implement technical cooperation projects aimed at strengthening human rights institutions and in reconstruction efforts.

A significant example is the ‘Programme Mali Nord’ being implemented by the GTZ in cooperation with the UNHCR, the European Community Humanitarian Office (ECHO) and the World Food Programme.

The programme is aimed at post-conflict reconstruction and environmental restoration, which is expected to enable some 150,000 nomads return to Mali, who had sought refuge in neighbouring countries in the aftermath of the Tuareg rebellion, which lasted five years until the end of the 1980s.

Economic reconstruction is also the buzzword in Vietnam where GTZ is assisting the Central Institute for Economic Management which serves as the think-tank of the Planning Ministry. It advises on measures required to promote investments by Vietnamese entrepreneurs and on reforming the state-owned enterprises and cooperatives.

As China liberalises its economy and reduces the role of the state in economic life, social security has become a major issue.

The GTZ is assisting the government in Beijing in drafting statutes aimed at evolving social security systems which have become indispensable in the wake of a huge privatisation effort now underway.With state enterprises passing on to private hands, some 50 million employees and workers are expected to be rendered unemployed in the coming years, says Bernd Eisenblaetter, senior director-general of the GTZ.

One of the organisations active worldwide in reconstruction and developmental efforts is the GTZ itself, based in Eschborn near Frankfurt. An extended arm of the German ministry of economic cooperation and development (BMZ), the autonomous GTZ is presently carrying out more than 2,800 projects in 142 countries. They include 48 countries in Africa, 35 in the Pacific, central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and West Asia, 25 in the Caribbean and Latin America, 29 in central and eastern Europe as well as the former republics of the now defunct Soviet Union.

The German Agency for Technical Cooperation is also engaged in Latin America, and significantly in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Colombia and Peru. In these countries, on the verge of earning the title of ‘highly industrialised states’, the gap between the haves and have-nots is widening.

Combating poverty, says the GTZ, has therefore become a central objective of development cooperation.