DEVELOPMENT BULLETIN-GERMANY: GTZ Expands Work in 142 Countries

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Ramesh Jaura

BONN, Dec 12 1998 (IPS) - One of the world’s largest consultancy organisations says it is widening the scope of its activity in the field of development cooperation – despite complex challenges and the increasing political nature of technical cooperation.

The German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ) intends expanding its work in development – be it helping control forest fires in Indonesia, AIDS prevention in Kenya, vocational training in Argentina or government advisory services in the countries of the former Soviet Union.

GTZ also has benefitted from an allocation of 11 million dollars from the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and development (BMZ) to be used to aid victims of hurricane ‘Mitch’ in Central America. Approximately two-thirds of this aid will go to Nicaragua and Honduras and the rest will be channelled to Guatemala, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic and Haiti, where hurricane ‘George’ caused much damage earlier in autumn.

The funds will be used to repair roads and bridges, in order to secure the food supply and to facilitate the reconstruction of the region. In the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, floods destroyed the most important bridges and washed away the water conduits at the same time.

GTZ’s work will focus on re-establishing supplies of potable water and rebuilding health facilities and schools and assisting numerous small businesses which, as a result of the hurricane, are no longer economically viable. An on-going disaster preparedness project in the region also will be more vigorously promoted.

“With these steps, we want to set a course which extends from emergency aid to effective, long-term development cooperation,” says Joerg Haas, the GTZ official responsible for cooperation with Central America. “The disaster has set the region back by decades, and it needs support from abroad.”

Because GTZ had an infrastructure and field staff in place in the region, it was able to start providing assistance directly after the hurricane struck. All activities are agreed in close cooperation with German and local aid organisations and “in this way we can ensure that the funds are used effectively, and the duplication of tasks is avoided,” Haas says.

Early last month, the BMZ approved some 4 million dollars in emergency aid for medicines, food, and water treatment plants, which was handed over in the region by Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, the new federal minister for economic cooperation and Development, and Ludger Volmer, minister of state at the Foreign Office in Bonn.

Giving an overview, GTZ’s director-general Gerold Dieke says: “We advise people and organisations in planning, implementing and evaluating projects and programmes in more than 142 countries of the world.”

Based in Frankfurt am Main, GTZ recruits local and German experts and provides them with intensive briefing and support during their assignment. Currently, some 1,600 field staff members are working together with 8,590 locally-contracted personnel. Another 800 are directly posted with employers in partner countries.

Should a country lack qualified personnel, GTZ organises customised training courses. Procurement services assist in obtaining the equipment and materials needed for project work; financial contributions are awarded and settled.

Equipment and financial contributions directly benefit projects and programmes and are non-reimbursable. More than 10,000 GTZ co- workers are helping in Africa, Asia and Latin America and in the transition countries of Central Europe to improve the living standards and opportunities for the people and preserve their natural basis of life. GTZ is mainly funded by the BMZ.

“The word ‘technical’ does not mean cooperation only in the field of technology,” says Dieke. “In fact ‘technical’ relates to an ancient Greek word meaning art or skill. The goal of technical cooperation is to help strengthen the skills and capabilities of the people in partner countries so that they can improve their living conditions self-reliantly,” he adds.

As Germany joined the international community in celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Thursday, Dieke said BMZ was spending some 120 million dollars a year to support bilateral projects aimed at improving the rights situation.

“Since 1991, when ideological barriers – which until the collapse of the Soviet Union had stood in the way of focusing on the rights situation – had been removed, no less than 220 projects targeted at creating the framework conditions conducive to the observance of human rights have been supported,” adds Dieke.

Among the countries where the GTZ is carrying out human rights projects are China, Vietnam, Eritrea, Rwanda, Central Africa, Venezuela and Guatemala. The rationale behind these projects is that active participation of people in the development process is a precondition for the achievement of sustained success.

“The efforts of our partner governments must be directed toward allowing people, particularly poor and discriminated groups in the population, to have a greater role in political, economic and social decisions,” says an official paper of the BMZ.

It is against this backdrop that the new German government under Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder will be upgrading the organisation and funding of Germany’s development cooperation with Third World countries. The government coalition in Bonn stipulated in its coalition agreement that Germany’s development policy is to be reformed, further developed and more efficiently organised.

In the process, the government also wants to see these efforts lead to greater coherence in its overall policy. The practice of assigning development policy tasks to a variety of ministries will be abandoned. Instead, responsibility for all such tasks be assigned to BMZ. This will include, for example, responsibility for matters involving the European Union’s development policy and for the advisory assistance provided for the reformist nations of Central and Eastern Europe.

Germany’s new government views development policy as global structural policy. The goal of development policy is to improve the economic, social, environmental and political conditions in the world’s developing countries. In this context, the German government is guided by the principle of global sustainable development.

Chancellor Schroeder said in his policy statement to the German Bundestag on November 20, “We know that something is seriously amiss when a few people are getting richer and richer while many are getting poorer and poorer. Overcoming the divide between poor and rich regions of the world remains the greatest international challenge on the threshold to the 21st century.”

For this reason, the new government plans to make special efforts to come closer to the internationally agreed goal under which industrialised nations are to spend the equivalent of 0.7 percent of their respective gross national product on government development cooperation.

The share of GNP generated by development aid fell by nearly half to just 0.28 percent during the previous government’s 16 years in office. “We will stop this downward trend,” Schroeder announced.

With the continual increase in commitment authorisations, GTZ hopes that this new government attitude toward development assistance will open up new areas of activity for the organisation.