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We recently wrote about ONE Germany’s “Artikel ONE” campaign to compel the German government to “focus on human dignity.” Carola Bieniek has a great play-by-play looking at the German coalition treaty, and gauging the campaign’s success:
 Following the German elections in September, the new government in Berlin is now formed of 3 parties – the CDU, the CSU and the FDP. In order for them to be able to work productively during their 4 year term they have agreed on a coalition treaty, which points the way for the for the future political direction of the German government.
As the goal of our ‘Article ONE’ campaign was to influence the content of the coalition treaty, we’ve picked apart the Article ONE and the treaty to see how we did:
Article ONE: “The German government has the duty to act decisively against extreme poverty….”
The coalition treaty speaks of values and interests in development politics. There is also an important reference, containing the commitment to fight extreme poverty, to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
Article ONE: “…The successes of the past years show that there is a way out of poverty….”
There is no reference to development successes of recent years in the coalition treaty.
Article ONE: “…Germany keeps its promise to Africa and will allocate 0,51% in 2010 and 0,7% of its gross national income no later than 2015 for development assistance….”
The international commitments to finance development are enforced in the treaty. However, whilst the 0.7% goal is named, concrete timing is not. However by referring to “international commitments” the treaty implies that this goal – through an intermediate goal of 0.51% ODA/GNI by 2010 – shall be reached by 2015. The CDU/CSU’s “Government Program 2009 to 2013” contains similar wording. ONE asked the Secretary Generals of the CDU and CSU to clarify this wording and they confirmed that the above interpretation is accurate. ONE therefore assumes the meaning is the same in the coalition treaty. There is, however, a reservation clause on the budget of which the exact relevance and meaning remain unclear to us.
The coalition treaty ensures a “design of development assistance tailored to the need at hand in the areas of biodiversity as well as the fight against climate change and hunger”. This will make substantial Overseas Development Aid (ODA) increases necessary.
Article ONE: “…Ownership as well as transparent and coordinated aid is key to highly effective development assistance….”
Strengthening the individual responsibility of the developing countries is named as a central element and the importance of coordination on a national as well as an international level is picked up broadly in the treaty. (more…)
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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 
In the evening we welcomed the development spokespersons from the 5 parties in the German parliament to a panel discussion. 
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.
