Germany
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.
Earlier this month, during the German government’s 2010 budget negotiations, ONE ran a campaign asking the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, to keep her promise towards people living in extreme poverty. Germany has committed itself to invest 0.51% of its gross national income to development by 2010 and to increase this share to 0.7% by 2015. So the question was whether these commitments would be reflected in the new budget.
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.
Alicia Blázquez from ONE’s Germany office checks in with this great report:
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.
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
