DEVELOPMENT: Sub-Saharan Africa a Top Priority in Germany’s Aid

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ramesh Jaura

BONN, Oct 18 1999 (IPS) - Sub-Saharan Africa takes priority over Asia and Latin America in Germany’s aid programmes, says a new report by the official agency for technical cooperation, known as GTZ.

However, the report does not deal with the possible impact the latest and additional cuts in Germany’s aid budget might have on development and technical cooperation programmes in countries south of the Sahara.

The declining aid budget has caused anxiety among officials of the German Agency for Technical Cooperation, which has been an important pillar of the country’s development cooperation in the past twenty-five years.

GTZ celebrated the silver jubilee last month in the presence of Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa.

The agency is based in Eschborn, near Frankfurt, and ranks among the world’s largest organisations for development cooperation. It is owned by the German government and is tasked with implementing technical cooperation programmes.

The agency officials are concerned because the 1999 budget of the Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development has been reduced from 4.23 billion last year to 3.91 billion dollars in 1999, as part of wide ranging austerity measures. A further cut of nearly 300 million dollars is expected next year.

Explaining the priority given to Africa south of the Sahara, the GTZ report says the aid programmes are prerequisite to sustainable development in the region.

The focus is on building democratic institutions, decentralising administrative structures and demobilising troops – often comprising child soldiers – engaged in long-drawn civil wars in some countries of the region.

According to the agency, 35.8 percent of the funds – amounting to 970 million dollars – it obtained from the Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development last year were spent in Africa south of the Sahara.

About 23 percent of the funds went to Asia and the Pacific, 12.7 percent to Latin America and 12.5 percent to the central and eastern European states.

This funding pattern tallied with the flow of Germany’s overall bilateral and multilateral aid. Of the 4.4 billion dollars last year, 39 percent were absorbed by Africa south of the Sahara.

About 29 percent were channelled to South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific region. Some 15 percent went to Latin America, 11 percent to the Mediterranean, Near East and Middle East countries and 6 percent to central and eastern European states.

A breakdown of figures in the GTZ report shows that the agency spent some 347 million dollars in Africa last year. Its ten major partners were Rwanda, Ethiopia, Egypt, Kenya, Guinea, Tanzania, Mali, Mozambique, Malawi and South Africa.

Technical cooperation with South Africa began in 1993 and, according to the report, has since been “continuously expanded”. Meanwhile, the agency is running 38 projects in the country with a view to assisting in capacity building.

The focus is on public administration and decentralisation, education and skills development, community and local economic development, economic growth and employment promotion.

Poverty alleviation and social development, environmental protection and conservation of natural resources as well as gender equality are priorities of cooperation.

In the past six years, the agency has spent 59 million dollars on technical assistance programmes in South Africa.

The importance of the agency’s cooperation with Africa in general and South Africa in particular was underlined by Mandela last month in an address during the agency’s silver jubilee celebrations.

“GTZ is making important contributions to the implementation of the educational reform and to the improvement of the quality of basic education,” the former president of South Africa told the gathering in Frankfurt.

“Development cooperation…must contribute to supplementing the globalisation of markets with a globalisation of ethics, equity, inclusion, human security, sustainability and development,” he added.

Bernd Eisenblaetter, one of the two directors general of the agency, appears to support Mandela when he points out: “As a state enterprise engaged in technical cooperation, GTZ was able to respond quickly to the upheavals and process of change taking place in the world.”

The focus of the agency’s work has switched from plain technical aid to inputs into fundamental processes of reform and transition in the partner countries.

GTZ thinks that progress in agriculture, the health sector or drinking water supplies depends very largely on whether and to what extent coherent national policies could be put in place and efficient institutions set up to implement them.

The second director general of GTZ, Hans-Dietrich Pallmann, says:”In international cooperation it is becoming ever more important to pay attention to the appropriate framework conditions. Increasingly the governments of partner countries are asking for support for structural changes.

“This entails a dialogue on development and technical cooperation. To the extent that technical cooperation is moving into political , it is taking advantage of the division of tasks between technical cooperation, non-governmental organisations and the political work of the foundations – and vice versa,” says Pallmann.