European Union
“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!
The AFP has a story this morning on the attempts to normalize relations between Zimbabwe and the European Union:
Zimbabwe will appoint a committee next week to try to mend fences with the European Union, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai said on Wednesday.
“Next week, we will put in place a mission designed to further normalise relations between Europe and Zimbabwe,” Tsvangirai said at a ceremony to accept a European education grant.
The 10.6-million-dollar (7.9-million-euro) grant will support a fund backing efforts to revive Zimbabwe’s public schools, after almost all of them shut down in 2008 at the height of the country’s decade-long economic crisis.
“The generous contribution today is a gesture of goodwill that serves as a reminder of the positive outcomes to be achieved as this government moves forward in… re-engaging with the international community,” Tsvangirai said.
Zimbabwe’s relations with the West were strained after President Robert Mugabe launched a violent campaign of land reforms 10 years ago, as his supporters staged deadly political attacks.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy is in Rwanda today after meeting with President Paul Kagame. This is the first time a French president has visited the country in 25 years.
According to the Washington Post:
The trip is also the first by a French leader since Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. It aims to cement diplomatic ties that were restored in November, three years after they broke down because of the arrest warrants that accused those close to Kagame of a role in the presidential assassination that sparked the genocide.
Sarkozy was met at Kigali’s airport by Rwanda’s prime minister and then visited the main genocide museum in the tiny, mountainous central African country. Afterward Kagame welcomed Sarkozy at his official residence.
France and Rwanda have sparred for years over an alleged French role in the genocide, in which 500,000 people, mostly ethnic Tutsis but also moderate Hutus, were massacred in frenzied killing led by radical Hutus.
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!
Carola Bieniek from ONE’s German office checks in with this great update:
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.”
In 2007, Germany pledged €600 million between 2008 and 2010 for the Global Fund at its own replenishment conference here in Berlin. ONE repeatedly praised Germany for this commitment. For us it came as a shock when we learned that the Government´s budget proposal for 2010 however does not follow through: GF contributions were reduced by €58m to €142m in 2010. This would have meant that the host of the last replenishment breaks it own promise in a year of the next replenishment – a really bad move.
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.
