Germany
How to sum up the last three days in Europe?
Stamina.
Not mine, but Bill Gates’… It’s unreal. He flew in overnight on Sunday, and in just two and a half days travelled to three cities, delivered three powerful Living Proof presentations, lobbied Presidents, Chancellors, and Ministers, gave numerous media interviews and rallied activists. He is a testament to the ability of a committed person to change the world. Of course, he has a few more resources at his disposal than most – but all the more impressive to think he could just be sat on a yacht sipping down piña coladas.
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This morning I traveled with 20 ‘ONE Youth Messengers’ to Bellevue Schloss, the official residence of the German President, to meet with President Wulff and Bill Gates and launch a new program to Share the Proof with other young people in Germany.
ONE Youth Messengers
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The DATA Report was launched today– Africa Day– in Berlin. A strong panel addressed the messages of the report. Hon. Zitto Kabwe, Member of Parliament of the United Republic of Tanzania, gave a fascinating insight to the African perspective of development cooperation. He also explained how aid has helped to bring about concrete improvements in his very own constituency.
Prof. Helmut Reisen, head of research of the OECD Development Centre, took a look at the G8 commitments altogether and alerted the audience to the so called “new donors”. Prof. Dr. Robert Kappel, President of the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) highlighted the economic prospects and challenges of African countries.
Germany’s final report card is not outstanding, as ONE’s Germany director Tobias Kahler pointed out. Only 25% of its Gleneagles promise was kept, especially since Berlin did not direct as much of its ODA raises to Africa as committed.
We also had a DATA Report launch in Ottawa, Canada that just wrapped up. We’ll have a report from that event soon. And we’ll have lots more on the 2010 DATA Report in coming days.
“Everybody understands that building a school helps to fight poverty. They also understand that building a hospital helps to fight poverty. But that information might even be more important is not quite as easy to understand for most.” This is how one of the participants of our aid effectiveness day last week described the problem at hand. Aid achieves measurable results every day in many places around the world. Still aid can be improved. So ONE Germany asked: What does tomorrow’s effective development assistance look like?
First we invited experts from the German government, our NGO partners and multilateral institutions such as the OECD-DAC to discuss in two workshops what the Accra Agenda and the G8 are doing (or could be doing) to improve aid transparency.
African governments need information on what kind of donor support will be delivered by when. Donors need information to better coordinate their efforts. And civil society in North and South needs information – this is for example how ONE is finding out whether rich countries are keeping their promises, information that is then published in the annual DATA Report.
One of the panelists in the workshops was Bashiru Jumah from the Ghanaian Social Enterprise Development Foundation (SEND). SEND is increasing transparency in Ghana by gathering information on aid flows: they find out which funds are supposed to go where and then go to the recipients – in the villages – and assemble data on which funds arrived and what they were used for. This is quite a tedious job which requires lots of patience and hard work from volunteers all over the country. But it delivers great results: when the parliament learnt in April that money for school feeding programs did not make it to the schools as planned they immediately replaced the national coordinator for the program. Bashiru said about the role of his civil society in Ghana: “Civil society participates in implementing and controlling poverty alleviation efforts. And our government understands that they profit from that.”
In the evening we welcomed the development spokespersons from the 5 parties in the German parliament to a panel discussion.
Hans-Jürgen Beerfeltz, Deputy Minister in the Development Ministry, opened the evening by confirming that while the German government was concentrating on improving aid effectiveness they would not forget their promises, one of which was to increase the ODA/GNI ratio to 0.7% by 2015.
What followed was a lively discussion among the development spokespersons about whether the new government’s efforts to reform the implementing organizations were sufficient, whether multilateral aid should be reduced in favor of bilateral aid, and which sectors were critical to development.
Development spokespersons in the German parliament: Ute Koczy (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen), Sascha Raabe (SPD), Harald Leibrecht (FDP), Holger Haibach (CDU/CSU), Heike Hänsel (Die Linke)
We closed out the day with a reception which allowed panelists and listeners to continue to exchange their views in more intimate conversations. And looking at the discussions we were confirmed: development assistance is reducing extreme poverty. But to make it most efficient and most effective it needs input from everyone concerned – and the first step on that path is to distribute information transparently.
Written with Barbara Hundt
The first ONE volunteer workshop for volunteers from Berlin and the surrounding area took place last Saturday. Let it be said that we not only applaud the volunteers’ courage for attending this first-ever event, but also greatly appreciate their willingness to spend a sunny Saturday with us!
The day began with a joint breakfast and a comprehensive introduction about how ONE came to be, how it operates and its goals. In light of the upcoming Millennium Development Review Summit in New York, we also introduced the volunteers to the development goals before they got the chance to develop and present a quick overview about one of the goals to the rest of the group. Of course, we also took the time to brainstorm about how the volunteers can join the fight against extreme poverty – with concrete results!
They decided to form a Berlin ONE group and get together every last Friday of the month in order to plan activities. In addition, the volunteers learned how to write advocacy letters – some delegates can expect to receive ONE mail within the next days! Last but not least, we practiced approaching and recruiting new ONE members via role playing. We all know role playing can be quite difficult. Still, the exercise was actually very well-received. As one participant put it: “Although role playing is always somewhat horrible – it’s always good practice! Therefore, do it again!”
We came to a similar conclusion, not just regarding the role playing but the workshop as a whole. We are planning to conduct further workshops with ONE volunteers in areas beyond Berlin. Working with these motivated individuals was a lot of fun and we look forward to the next time!
In 2007 the German government hosted a replenishment conference for the Global Fund in Berlin. To underline its role as host Germany promised to give €200m annually to the Fund between 2008 and 2010. Right now, the German parliament is discussing the 2010 budget.
We were quite surprised to see that section 23 – the part of the budget that holds most of the funds going to development – foresees only €142m for the Global Fund. The development ministry was quick to clarify that the remaining €58m would come from funds that were not used throughout the year, and that those funds just wouldn’t show up in the budget proposal. But ONE and other NGOs are wondering: Why the hide-and-seek?
So ONE and 10 other NGOs, among them Oxfam and Medicines Sans Frontiers, published an open letter addressed to the five parliamentarians that report to the budget committee about section 23 of the budget in which we call on the Bundestag to include the full funds that were promised in the 2010 budget. We’ll keep you posted on further developments!
