ONE co-founder Bono is a contributing columnist for the New York Times and his latest column appears today.

Written as a screenplay that spans 20 years, the piece focuses on both the artistic process and some important work in Germany during the 2007 G8 summit. Below is an excerpt from a scene at the 2007 G8 in which Bono, Bob Geldof, Youssou N’Dour and ONE’s policy team speak with Chancellor Angela Merkel about Germany fulfilling its aid commitments. You can read the full piece here.

Excerpt:

The atmosphere is tense. The activists are not getting what they want. The leaders are not getting what they want, either, which is to be left alone by the activists, including the Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour, Bono and another grizzled Irish rocker, BOB GELDOF, and their policy team from ONE. The organization took its name from the song — over the protests of the songwriter, who felt that if history eventually repeats itself as farce, then irony, the next time around, sounds annoyingly earnest.

BOB (whose humor and intellect more than excuse the percussive expletives that pepper even the most formal meetings) Chancellor, what Germany has done is awe-inspiring. You’ve spent most of the last 20 years spending something like 4 percent of your G.D.P. on reunification … and yet you’re still willing to commit 0.7 percent of G.D.P. to global economic development. The lives of people you will never know or meet will be owed to this decision…. The 2008 budget backs that up, but the rest of the world will need to see ’09 to know you’re serious.

BONO (interrupting) Trajectory is everything. If the ‘09 is like ‘08, Germany will show the rest of the G-8 that they have to put money on the table as well as words.

MERKEL (who has met these men before and appeared to enjoy the encounters, but today is running out of patience with anyone who threatens to rain on her G-8 parade) I’m not prepared to commit beyond 2008. We will of course do our best.

BONO (at his least appealing) Let me just say, Madam Chancellor, that, like Bob, I’m intoxicated by the new Germany. Fifty thousand turned up today to stand in solidarity with the world’s poor. You yourself are so committed…the government…the coalition. And we absolutely take you at your word, but if the others don’t come through … well, you know nothing creates cynics faster than when leaders accept applause for commitments they then fail to meet. It’s one thing to break a promise to yourself or to your own electorate, but to break a promise to the most vulnerable people on the planet is profane.

MERKEL (in a quiet, calm voice) My father taught me a very important lesson when I was a girl growing up in East Germany. He said, “Always be more than you appear and never appear to be more than you are.”

Our friends from the ONE Germany office bring us the latest on their fantastic Artikel ONE Campaign:

Yesterday marked the highlight of our 2009 German election campaign. We met with Volker Kauder, the head of the largest faction in the new Bundestag – the CDU/CSU. We were actress Minh-Khai Phan-Thi, actor Jan Josef Liefers, TV host Cherno Jobatey, the German ONE team and four ONE supporters. We handed over not only the Artikel ONE and the more than 6,000 signatures of ONE supporters – some of them seasoned politicians themselves – but also a blanket made of handkerchiefs. People we met on our trip to Tanzania – students, mothers, nurses, farmers, engineers,… – had signed them and written their wishes to the German people on them.

Volker Kauder wouldn’t make any promises on keeping the German governments promise to increase ODA to 0.51 % of the nation’s GNI by next year or to 0.7 % by 2015. However, he remembered a meeting we had with him ten months ago when we handed him and his social democrat colleague Peter Struck a large thank you note to thank the German parliament for repeatedly increasing ODA. Kauder: “In the current economic climate I cannot promise anything. But I sure want another one of these thank you notes!” Well, you know what to do!

…but what comes next?

The general elections in Germany on September 27 resulted in heavy losses for the Social Democrats (SPD). The market liberal Free Democrats (FDP) gained the most and will now form a coalition government with Chancellor Merkel´s Christian Democrats (CDU), which lost some voter confidence but remains by far the biggest party.

The coalition negotiations of FDP and CDU/CSU started on October 5 and are still ongoing. They will result in an agreement on ministerial appointments, as well as an agreement about the general framework of the new government policies for the next 4 years. The coalition contract will probably be signed in late October or early November. FDP leader Guido Westerwelle will possibly become foreign minister and vice chancellor and Angela Merkel will remain Chancellor.

The ONE team in Germany has launched various actions to support advocacy and awareness-raising in this critical phase while the new government team is planning for the coming years.

One good example is ‘The Article ONE’ – a summary of our demands for the next German government that was presented by Bob Geldof and others to the media earlier this year. It alludes to the first article of the German constitution which compels any form of public authority to focus on human dignity. So far, the Article ONE has been signed by several thousand ONE supporters, many high profile personalities, and by more than 110 current members of parliament from all parties.

The Article ONE petition will soon be handed over, together with handkerchiefs carrying messages from our recent trip to Tanzania. This will mark the end of ONE’s Germany election campaign – but certainly not the end of our activities. Our advocacy work with Germany’s new government will just be beginning!

-Sergius Seebohm

What is ONE? What would you say if you had to explain it to your neighbor? We often say ONE is an advocacy group. We say ONE is lobbying politicians to fight poverty and preventable disease. And we often say ONE is a about a spirit of being a community of people around the world who strongly believe that where you live should not determine if you live.

Alright. A long explanation. And not very visual. The team of ONE Germany tried to tell about the strong community that ONE can be – a community of left and right, student and manager, housewife and movie star – in just 90 seconds. With a spot.

The story: A man and a woman are talking in a restaurant. He talks about Africa, bragging a bit about what he knows about achievements and success stories by the poorest countries. But he can’t really tell what he wants to. The lady at his table seems to know everybody in the room and they keep being interrupted. By the waiter, the newspaper man and also by really famous German actors and singers including Bono, Benno Fuermann, Michael Mittermeier, Katja Riemann, Jan Josef Liefers, Rea Garvey, Minh-Khai Phan-Thi, Cherno Jobatey, Jana Pallaske. At the end she asks him: Ok, and what are YOU actually doing about Africa?

And there it is: what ONE is about. Anybody can join to encourage policy makers around the world for more and better efforts in the fight against extreme poverty.

We shot this spot in just ONE day with such tremendous help from so many people – it is hard to thank them adequately. They contributed their skills and work just to help ONE: the extras, the technical crew, the production, Anne von Keller and Philip Mauritz who are starring in the spot, our director Benjamin Quabeck, Bono and as much as eight famous German artists. We probably had the most impressive cast of all film productions in Germany this year!

A great thank you should also go to the movie theatre group CineStar. Thanks to their support we will be able to show the spot on 437 screens across Germany. A great thanks to MTV which will also screen our spot and to the social network studiVZ/meinVZ for their continued support.

All of this comes at a crucial point in time: the parties CDU/CSU and FDP won the German elections and currently are negotiating their common policies in a government coalition. With the support from more and more Germans who support ONE we might be able to convince them to make the fight against poverty a strong part of German politics for the next four years. More and more people will join. Be ONE of us.

-Sergius Seebohm

Our friends at the ONE Germany office just returned from a very successful trip to Tanzania to study the progress being made in the fight against poverty. Carola Bieniek chronicles the trip in vivid detail (and great photos):

Last week ONE Germany organized our first ever Africa trip. We took actress Minh-Khai Phan-Thi, actress and singer Jana Pallaske and musician Rea Garvey to Tanzania. Despite all the differences between the 48 countries South of the Sahara we think that Tanzania can be considered as a good example for much of Africa: the economy has shown steady growth, which is in part due to good governance; child and maternal mortality have dropped; Tanzania has made enormous progress in primary school enrollment. Only a few days after the German general elections and before the new government has been formed we wanted to show our guests how important targeted and effective development assistance is.

We started out on Tuesday morning in Arusha at two local health centers. In Tanzania medical treatment for pregnant women and children under five is free. So we wanted to find out what this meant for the women. At the first clinic we were astonished by the sheer lack of things: there were almost no supplies and even the lab’s only equipment was an old German microscope. But we also met Agnes, a mother of two, who benefitted from the government’s efforts to eradicate deaths through malaria. The clinic informed her of the disease and handed her a voucher to replace the family’s old net. At the second clinic we saw hundreds of women waiting for pre-natal examinations, birth, vaccinations for their newborns, contraceptives or HIV meds. We came to chat with a couple of the women and Dr. Solomon Ole, the district’s Health Coordinator.

Asked what they’d need most we received different answers – a building to protect the women from the weather, an ambulance, an incinerator. And I somehow understood why it’s called development corporation: it takes a good government to set plans to defeat disease and unnecessary deaths but it also takes donors to fulfill their promises to realize these.

In the afternoon we took a tour of Tanzania Pharmaceutical Industries. The company ventures to break Tanzania’s dependence on foreign pharmaceutics. Together with the NGO action medeor they’re building a new plant to produce ARVs.

Day 2 was rather hectic: (more…)

The situation is a bit odd. The world’s third largest economy will have national elections in less than a week’s time. More than 62 million men and women eligible to vote can set the country’s course for the next four years. But the country hasn’t seen much of a campaign. No ferocious fighting over tough issues. Even the media seem to be somewhat halfhearted when covering the candidates and their positions. Germany’s national election campaign 2009 is boring.

Why? The current government lead by Angela Merkel rests on a majority of Germany’s two major parties: CDU and SPD. Ms. Merkel’s principal contender is vice-Chancellor and Federal Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. When the world financial crisis hit at the end of last year both parties declared that the German people expected crisis management. Not mudslinging about the upcoming elections. And they were probably right. So the crisis forced the two ruling parties into a discipline at work. During the very last weeks before Election Day we could watch a bit more efforts by both sides to explain the political differences between the two. But nevertheless – the key political decisions of the last four years were made by the two large parties together. A government running against itself… how exciting is that?

So everyone in Germany is watching the polls to have a notion of what will happen in this country after September 27. And from the arithmetic of Germany’s five parties which are likely to make it into the next Bundestag the most likely alternatives are a continuation of the current coalition of SPD and CDU lead by Ms Merkel or a coalition of CDU and the more market liberal FDP. And then again – you never know: It is still possible that Mr. Steinmeier will become chancellor of a coalition made up by SPD, FDP and Green party.

What does this mean for Germany’s role in the global fight against poverty? Most parties are quite close in their positions on development as ONE found out in a questionnaire it sent out to the most important candidates. Even Ms Merkel was quite outspoken about Germany’s responsibility to keep the aid promise – but became clearly less forthright during the recent months when the burdens of the financial crisis became more and more evident. Now there is a clear danger that political decision makers overlook the necessity and potential for economic recovery which lies in development of the poorest countries. This is why we need to act.

During the last months ONE has been mobilizing thousands of voices – famous and non-famous – across the country to sign the Article ONE. The Article ONE is an abbreviated version of our demands for Germany’s policy during the next four years. As soon as the ballot is cast and the protagonists of the next four years begin to shake out we will confront them with all the impressive names which support the Article ONE. We will even go on a trip to Tanzania with well known German artists to gather stories from first hand that aid is working. The poorest people of the planet do not deserve that the promises given to them can be reneged because too many billions were given to bankrupt banks. We are ready to go. The weeks after the elections will not be boring at all.

-Carola Bieniek

In Germany the budget negotiations are about to begin and we are in an election year.

Germany is still quite a big step away from fulfilling its Gleneagles commitment. So we wanted to ask the question to all major parties in this campaign: “Who will do as promised?” A question as thrilling as an action blockbuster, we thought.

Check out Germany’s leading politicians as action heroes and listen to Benno Fürmann, one of Germany’s most famous actors in our very new video “Promises” (translation below).

This is the year 2009.

Nine years ago 189 countries gave their word.

[speaker] “The Millennium Development Goals. Not to shy away from any effort to fight global poverty.”

But a threat is approaching.

The global economic crisis hits the poorest countries and threatens to cause poverty and hunger where there was just a glimpse of hope for the better.

Now courageous men and women are in demand.

Angela Merkel says [readable text / speech bubble]: “We as the Federal Government feel obliged, also now in a time of crisis and decreased tax revenue, not to scale down our ODA spending but to increase it, as this is of utmost importance for the people in the regions concerned.”

Frank-Walter Steinmeier says [readable text / speech bubble]: “If we want to prevent the crisis we have to take care of the structural causes for conflicts. Part of this is the fight against hunger and poverty and the facilitation of economic development.”

They know: This is about 0,2%. An important step between now and the promise to invest 0,51% of economic power in development by 2010. Will Germany keep her promise and support the poorest in their efforts, for more trade, good governance, education, infrastructure, agriculture, health systems and sanitation?.

Millions of Germans are looking at the men and women who hold this in their hands.

[as text underneath the picture]For 67 percent of Germans the credibility of politics also depends on keeping the promises to the World’s poorest. (emnid – famous polling institute)

Time is running out. Promises have been made. But who will act as they promised?

You can obligate them. With your name. For the article ONE.

Vote already today. Until September 27th

-Sergius Seebohm

Last week, the German city of Bremen hosted this year’s Protestant Church Festival– ‘Kirchentag’. This is an important biannual event not just for Protestants, but for everyone. A glance at the list of prominent visitors underscores its significance: Chancellor Angela Merkel, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, President Horst Köhler and Nobel Peace Prize winner Martti Ahtisaari were among the more than 100,000 visitors – as was ONE!

Issues of global justice have always featured prominently in the Kirchentag’s 60 year history but at a time of economic crisis these were more pressing than ever. German Development Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul took the opportunity in Bremen to call for renewed efforts to combat the effects of the crisis on suffering developing countries. Similarly, World Bank president Robert Zoellick demanded more and better aid for poor countries – considering that they are the least to blame for the present crisis: “It would be a tragedy if the poorest countries were the ones to pay the highest price.”

A ONE team informed Kirchentag visitors about the current challenges in developing countries. We handed out postcards and whitebands and asked participants to support the Article ONE with their signature. The Article ONE calls on the future German government (elections will be held in September) to keep their internationally given commitments to help end extreme poverty. We were supported by ONE member Ro’Shan and his band who improvised a gig in the street and in between their songs asked listeners to sign the Article ONE. Thanks to the attention raised by the band’s fantastic music, we were able to collect many sign ups and have many interesting discussions on development with the audience.

-Alicia Blázquez Fernández

As you know, the World Economic Forum was held in Davos last week, and much of it has been widely reported. On Friday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke. As a German I was excited to hear her announcement that Germany will again increase ODA “significantly” in 2010! But let’s have a more systematic look at what she said. In her speech she described the German reaction on the financial and economic crisis. After describing the national approach (mobilization of € 81 billion as economic stimulus) she added that the German reaction includes a strong international prong. As part of this, 5 elements are important to Germany (but also for the international community):

1. Continued support for a market economy: She suggested internationalizing the German model of “social market economy”, which recognizes that the forces of the market are necessary for prosperity, but that these forces need an order, which the government has to guarantee.
2. Reform of international organizations: She added that the G8 will not be able to do the job on their own. The new format of the G20, meeting at the Heads of government/state level, is therefore a “formidable development as we move forward”. This includes the lesson that nation states need to transfer sovereignty in some cases – a lesson that EU member states have learned and even other big nations will have to learn.
3. Open world economy: This includes a successful end to the Doha-round.
4. Sustainable use of natural resources: Especially strong commitments from developed countries in the run up to the Copenhague climate deal.
5. Fight against poverty: just as in 2009 Germany will increase ODA “significantly” in 2010. She sketched three consequences if aid were to lose its importance: political instability, a widening development gap in the world, and diminished hopes in those countries that have received our promises in the forms of the MDGs.

As a way forward, Merkel suggested that a G20 “Charta for sustainable economic activity” could be the departing point to establish the “UN Economic Council”. She will meet with Worldbank, IMF, OECD, WTO and ILO in the week of 2 February to discuss the role of international organizations and their division of labour.

She also mentioned that the German “social market economy” can serve as a role model for a globalized world. The following argumentation shows that this would bring Africa into the picture: the basic idea of the social market economy is that the state enables its citizens to be economically productive. This creates wealth. However, a large percentage of Africans currently lack the preconditions to be productive, as they suffer from malnourishments or diseases or lack access to basic education. African enterprises are held back by a lack of energy and infrastructure. An internationalized “social market economy” must therefore encompass a mechanism to create preconditions for productivity. The three elements of such a mechanism are more and better aid, a trade deal for Africa and maintaining sustainable debt levels.

-Andreas Huebers

Last Friday, the German parliament (the Bundestag) approved its 2009 budget with a $1.1 billion (800 million Euro) increase in development assistance spending for next year.

This is great news and marks the third year in a row that Germany has made impressive increases in development spending. This is an increase of more than 12% since 2008, the largest for any ministry in Germany. We know that this money will make a difference- it can be used, for example, to buy and distribute 180 million insecticide treated bed nets or to supply 5.5 million AIDS-patients with antiretroviral treatment for a whole year.

A substantial portion of the increase (225 million Euro) will be generated through an innovative financing scheme launched by the German government last year. Through this scheme, Co2-certificates are auctioned off to German industry to help pay for development projects. Development funding from this source has almost doubled since 2008- from 120 million to 225 million Euro. Steep increases can be expected in the years ahead. And for the first time, in 2009 these funds can be partly used for development assistance in any sector (as opposed to being fully earmarked for funding climate-related activities like adaptation and mitigation).

This decision pushes Germany a step closer towards fulfilling its aid commitments to the world’s poorest countries. However, increases from Germany and the rest of the G8 will need to accelerate much faster to meet the promises made in 2005 at the Gleneagles summit. Here in Europe, we’re hopeful that President-elect Obama’s commitment to meeting the Millennium Development Goals and doubling foreign assistance will play an exemplary role for Germany and the rest of the EU and inject new momentum into meeting these commitments.

-Andreas Huebers, ONE Germany