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!

This week the German Development Minister Dirk Niebel returned from his first trip to Africa. Niebel has only been in office for ten weeks, and before he took the post he was most famous in the development world for demanding the development ministry be shut down. So you can imagine that there was quite a bit of criticism and skepticism from the development community before Niebel took off to Rwanda, DRC and Mozambique.

On his first stop in Rwanda Niebel met with President Kagame and they both agreed that trade is the only thing that can help develop a country in the long term.

In DRC, however, Niebel learned that it’s not all that easy. The minister went to war-torn East Congo to see a hospital that cares especially for women that have endured sexual violence. He also went to see what’s left of the country’s vast forests and visited with the MONUC troops. And he found that different places might need different approaches. In DRC that approach might be to strengthen civil society and international efforts.

While Rwanda is seen by many as a “donor darling” for all the progress the country has made after the 1994 genocide, and DRC as seen as a country with so much potential, Niebel’s third stop was Mozambique. Germany has a special relationship with the country: during the Cold War many young Mozambicans came to East Germany for an education. After the 16 year civil war in Mozambique ended in the early 1990s the country, though extremely poor, was considered one of the most democratic countries on the continent. Former President Chissanó was even awarded the Mo Ibrahim Award for his efforts. Lately governance has taken a turn for the worse after some alleged irregularities in the 2009 general elections and widespread corruption being an open secret. Minister Niebel led some discussions with the Mozambican government on aid in the form of budget support as being the most efficient way to support the country’s development efforts.

After his return Minister Niebel acknowledged that he had learned a lot about the potentials but also the problems of the African continent. He also found his ministry’s focus on Sub-Sahara Africa confirmed as a good and worthwhile strategy.

Niebel’s conclusion after one week “on the ground”: “Africa‘s diversity is mirrored in our different approaches to development cooperation in those three countries. I would hope that the diversity of our neighboring continent and its potentials were seen more clearly in Germany.”

This Tuesday, the Ministry of Development Cooperation reversed the cuts. The shortfall of 58 million Euro will now come from unspent 2009 money and the “planning reserve” (financial reserves for unexpected expenditures) in the 2010 budget, we and others were told by the Deputy Minister. This money will not be taken away from other budgeted programs as far as we know.

The Financial Times Deutschland on Wednesday reported on the protests against the cuts, using the headline: “Cuts of Anti-Aids-Support Causes Protests” / “Development Ministry back pedals after criticism”. The FTD mentions the organization ONE (“who is supported by Rockstar Bono”…) along with our NGO-friends DSW criticizing the Government for breaking its promises.

Angela Merkel has repeated this promise several times, and we expected her words to be matched by action even in difficult budgetary times and with a new German government in office. Thousands of German ONE supporters joined us to voice this expectation by signing our petition to the Chancellor. And many even phoned the government‘s hotline to personally stress the importance of living up to our commitments.

Unfortunately, it looks like this time our voices have not been heard. Last week, the government presented the draft budget and there is only one way to describe it: the budget proposal equals a breach of promise, as the following figures illustrate.

• 300 million Euros – the increase the new Development Minister, Dirk Niebel, had asked for before the start of the budget negotiations.
• 67 million Euros – the increase he was able to get. This equals an increase of the development budget of no more than 1.2%
• 13% – the growth of last year’s development budget when the ministry was still lead by Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul.
• 3 billion Euros – what would have been necessary in addition to last year’s budget for Germany to reach its target for 2010. The fact that Germany is now missing this target means that from 2010 on, Germany will have to increase its development budget by 1.5 billion Euros every year to reach the target for 2015.

So as 2009 ends the news isn’t as great as we hoped here in Berlin. But we have to look forward. 2010 is going to be a very important year for Africa. It’s the year our promises are due, and it’s also the year of the football World Cup in South Africa. The whole world will be looking at the continent – at the challenges it is facing, but also at the amazing African success stories. We have to take advantage of the public attention and get the German government back on track towards the 0.7% goal.

The ONE team in Berlin remind Chancellor Merkel of her aid promises

This week, the members of the German government are coming together to negotiate the budget for 2010. Which ministry is going to get how much? Will Germany keep its Overseas Development Aid (ODA) promises? Whatever happens this week’s negotiations will set the course for 2010.

Germany has repeatedly promised to contribute its share to the fight against extreme poverty and preventable diseases. In 2005 Chancellor Merkel spoke to the German parliament and committed to the international ODA goals – according to which Germany needs to invest 0.51% by 2010 and 0.7 %of the gross national income to development assistance. And in early 2009, in the midst of the financial and economic crisis, Chancellor Merkel reiterated again the importance of increasing Germany’s ODA even in tough financial times.

Now Chancellor Merkel needs to live up to her own words. We remember them, and hope that she does too. But just in case we’ve launched a new campaign to remind the Chancellor of her own commitments. We are asking German ONE supporters to sign a petition to the Chancellor, and supporters have even called the hotline of the German government to make sure the message is being heard.

Today the ONE team in Berlin, wearing masks of the Chancellor and equipped with huge speech bubbles with her own words, went to the Brandenburg Gate, in the very heart Berlin’s government district.

Let’s hope the Chancellor gets the message.

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.”

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!

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

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

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: we got up early in the morning to go to Moshi, nearby Mount Kilimanjaro, a couple of kilometers outside Arusha. We met with a lot of people who profited from an IFAD initiative. The women of Shiri Group had been introduced to a food processor: mangos, bananas, herbs, hibiscus flowers – all of these can only be stored for a couple of days, maybe weeks before they go bad. The food processor helps to dry the fruits, herbs and flowers in a rather easy process. But the women didn’t stop at producing for their own use. They’re also packing their goods and selling as far as Dar es Salaam. The 200 or so families organized in the mushroom group have even started to grow a crop previously unknown in the country. They’re growing Oyster mushrooms in small huts in their gardens. And while at first the hotels and restaurants that cater to tourists were the only customers Tanzanians have adopted the mushroom as well: they process it to jam, bread, samosas and so on.

The Muungano SACCOS is a micro credit facility financed by the borrowers themselves. Since 80 % of Tanzanians don’t have access to bank credits they rely on the Savings and Credit Cooperative Societies from which they buy shares; and should they need a credit they can borrow up to three times their deposit.

Water was the topic of the afternoon. We saw a project supported by German implementation organization KfW. Once finished the project will give 30 villages (or 100.000 people) access to drinking water. The spin that made it most interesting to us: sustainability – the villagers themselves have been included from the beginning. They decided where the water should come from and where the standpipes should go, they have to volunteer their time for trenching and carrying the pipes and the project team is also banking on Tanzanians to maintain the pipes and tanks.

After a stressful but inspirational day we had to rush to the airport to move on to the country’s unofficial capital Dar es Salaam.

Thursday started with education. We went to meet with parents, teachers, students and education activists at a primary school. First off we were struck by a simple logic: The government has made it its goal to grant every child in the country primary education. And as a matter of fact enrollment has risen to 98 % in just a few years. However, at which cost? At the school we went to the premises had been cut in half so that they now house two schools with each school having as many students as the one school before: more than 2,000. I was most intrigued by a 14 year old boy who was learning with 100 children in his class, 6 or 7 of them sharing a book, 4 of them sharing a desk that was made for 2: he spoke of the challenges getting an education meant for him and his family. But he also spoke of his dream of becoming a layer; which watching him speak I could believe instantly.

The afternoon of the third day we met with German development experts at the embassy to receive an outside / inside overview of development in Tanzania.

On our last day we went to see one of Tanzania’s largest tax payers: Twiga Cement. It was truly inspirational to see a company take corporate social responsibility as serious as the managers at Twiga do. But they were honest about saying that it’s also in their self-interest. Numbers proved them right: while their competitors showed only minor growth or even shrank in the last couple of years Twiga was able to increase sales by a third in a 2008 alone. Manager Pascal sent us on the way saying that there were some things that only development assistance could provide. But that it’s also on private entrepreneurship from locals and foreign investors alike to develop a country.

Then we went to see another water project. This time it was DAWASA who showed us how Dar es Salaam is trying to get a hold of the city’s water and sanitation problems. Since the city has grown and still is growing largely uncontrolled people have to buy from vendors or walk for miles for water. The sewer systems are often aged and don’t have enough capacity for city of 3 million.

We concluded the day with a dinner with Tanzanian personalities: Margaret Chacha, who only a few months ago founded the Tanzanian Women’s Bank, Banana Zorro, a very well known singer (later that night we even had a chance to see him and his father perform live on stage), Mrisho Mpoto, an illustrious poet and artist, and Rakesh Rajani, who has been involved in several NGOs to monitor and improve Tanzanian and African governments. Once again we received the message that it’s about development corporation not aid: everyone has to do their share – Tanzanians and donors alike.

The trip to Tanzania offered a multitude of impressions. We saw lots of progress but also lots of challenges. We saw how the people of Tanzania are proud of their country that beside the projects we saw has some of the world’s most impressive landscapes and wildlife. We saw potential that only wants an opportunity to prove itself.