DEVELOPMENT-GERMANY: New Role for a Leading Aid Agency

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Walter Kissinger

FRANKFURT, Nov 5 2001 (IPS) - The state-owned German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ), with 67 offices around the world, has acquired a crucial role in Germany’s aid policy.

GTZ’s new role followed last year’s decision by the German federal parliament Bundestag to focus bilateral cooperation on 70 developing countries.

The objective is to increase the efficiency of aid and support efforts aimed at strengthening regional cooperation, says a senior official of the Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), Michael Bohnet.

“This (new government policy) enables us to respond professionally and flexibly, and at short notice, within a setting that is changing at an ever-increasing pace – a crucial factor, especially in the case of emergency assistance measures,” says GTZ director-general Bernd Eisenblaetter.

The GTZ head office in Eschborn, near Frankfurt, has four regional departments that gather knowledge about individual countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Mediterranean region, Europe and Central Asia.

Few other organisations in Germany can offer such interdisciplinary experience and information about processes of change in developing and transition countries. The Planning and Development department serves as the pool of the GTZ’s extensive expertise.

Germany’s annual budget for development cooperation amounts to some 4 billion dollars – just under 0.3 percent of gross national income. The United Nations target envisages 0.7 percent.

The rich industrial nations regard 146 countries around the globe as “developing”. Until recently, the German government provided official aid to 118 such developing countries.

The new policy will enable GTZ to respond directly to tensions and conflicts, and reconcile divergent interests. These potentials are becoming increasingly important, as crisis prevention and conflict management continue to move higher up Germany’s development cooperation agenda, adds Eisenblaetter.

Last year, the GTZ, on behalf of the German government, prepared two major conferences: the Fourth Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP4) to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification in Bonn, and the Sino-German Environment Conference in Beijing.

More than 2,000 participants from 170 countries, including heads of government and ministers, gathered in Bonn to discuss strategies and methods that might be deployed to halt the global advance of deserts, which is affecting the lives of 1.3 billion people.

A special unit set up within the GTZ liases with the secretariat of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (CCD) in Bonn, and helps boost the CCD implementation process into the practical measures of development cooperation for natural resource management and desertification control in dry zones.

According to project coordinator Guenter Winckler, the GTZ’s CCD unit is carrying out multifarious activities, including the analysis of German experiences in combating desertification, ongoing strategic development of measures to combat desertification, and development of cooperative arrangements with German universities.

The unit is also involved in an exchange of experiences and cooperation with international committees and organisations – such as the World Bank, UN Development Programme (UNDP), Club du Sahel – including international non-governmental organisations (NGOs), interested in implementation of the CCD.

The CCD unit is happy that in December last year, Chinese and German ministers as well as 1,100 policymakers and representatives of the private sector, the academic community and non-governmental organisations, met in Peking to discuss joint strategies for sustainable development, improved environmental protection and environmentally sound urban planning.

GTZ’s Logistics Division also last year organised the transport of 115 trams to Romania. The tramcars had been donated by several German public utilities for use as public transport vehicles in Romanian cities and towns.

GTZ also has been assigned a crucial role in winning over private companies to co-finance government-aided projects in the developing countries. An example of the so-called public-private partnerships (PPPs) is an innovative solid waste management system in Peru, which is being introduced in cooperation with the TBW Company of Frankfurt.

In Ghana, GTZ and the Draeger Company of Luebeck is training skilled workers in the medical engineering sector. In Nepal, in cooperation with the Sulzberg company ‘Primavera Life’, GTZ is training local specialists in organic farming practices.

GTZ was established in 1975. Within the framework of a general agreement, its major client, the Federal German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development vested in it responsibility for conducting technical cooperation activities.

GTZ also supports development and reform processes on behalf of German government ministries, and international organisations and institutions, such as the European Union, the United Nations and the World Bank.