Aid organizations have warned Berlin about instrumentalizing development work to further national interests. Germany's next government needs to focus less on curbing migration and more on crisis prevention, they said.
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With refugees and immigration policies serving as one of the main stumbling stones in Germany's ongoing coalition talks, NGOs cautioned on Friday against the rising trend of development aid being used to further Germany's political goals at home.
"There's a growing danger that the use of development funds will be more determined by the domestic debate on migration management and security than by the shared responsibility of a rich, industrialized country for sustainable global development," Germany's Welthungerhilfe, an organization that fights hunger worldwide, and the child welfare organization Terre des Hommes said in their annual joint report.
"Human rights are in danger of falling by the wayside," they added.
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The report, titled "Compass 2030: The Reality of German Development Policy" urged that development policy "must not be instrumentalized" by Germany's next government to further migration or internal security goals.
The charity organizations advised against folding development policy into Germany's Foreign Ministry, saying it should be treated as an independent policy area. They expressed concern that development initiatives would get lost in the competition between Germany's ministries.
"The new legislative period presents and opportunity for a strategy debate on how development cooperation will be organized in the future," the report "Compass 2030: The Reality of German Development Policy" states.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other European leaders have been pushing for more development cooperation with African nations to boost their economies and create jobs in order to reduce the number of migrants and refugees coming to Europe.
The G20 action plan agreed upon in Hamburg this summer took an "every man for himself" approach to carrying out development initiatives in African countries rather than agreeing on common, binding goals, the NGOs said.
They cited three separate economic initiatives for Africa from Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the Finance Ministry (BMF) and the Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy as "prime examples of competing rather than coherent policies."
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Combatting the cause, not the symptom
Welthungerhilfe and Terre des Hommes also called on the next German government to put more effort into preventing conflicts rather than fueling them.
Germany should "no longer speak about combatting the causes of migration while at the same time arming countries engaged in conflicts, like Saudi Arabia," Terre des Hommes board spokesman Jörg Angerstein said in a statement.
"A policy that seeks to fight the causes of migration must also address the number one cause — conflicts and instability," the report stated, adding that "migration can neither be stopped nor decisively controlled."
Development aid can only help reduce the number of people who flee their home countries "due to a lack of perspectives and political participation" by improving their living conditions.
rs/kms (AFP, dpa, KNA)
How emerging donors are transforming the foreign aid industry
Since the global financial crisis, developed countries have been tightening their foreign aid spending. But BRICS countries and other rising economies are expanding the funding pie, a new report has found.
Image: Getty Images/AFP/K. Fukuhara
New players in development assistance
Despite signs of slowing growth, the scope and scale of emerging donor activity has increased markedly over the past few years. According to a study conducted by global development platform Devex, emerging donors could contribute close to 20 percent of total foreign aid by 2020, up from an estimated 7-10 percent in 2012.
Image: Reuters/D. Siddiqui
The rising dragon
With a 2013 foreign aid budget of $7.1 billion (5.93 billion euros), China is not only by far the biggest emerging donor, it's also the sixth-largest in the world. Reaching 121 countries, Beijing’s program has a clear Africa focus and is a key element of its diplomatic and economic push into the continent. Almost half of China’s overall foreign aid goes towards infrastructure projects.
Image: picture alliance/dpa/O. Berg
Sustained aid growth?
The Devex report, which surveyed nearly 1,000 development executives, says emerging donors will continue to boost their foreign aid spending over the next decade. "We are taking efforts to increase steadily the size of our ODA [Official Development Assistance] for several years," the deputy government director for ODA South Korea said in the report.
United Arab Emirates on the rise
In 2013, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) recorded the largest jump in its development assistance among all donor governments — a staggering 435 percent increase. The bulk of UAE's foreign aid goes to majority-Muslim countries, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa. The Gulf State is also a major donor to humanitarian crises as far as the Philippines and the Central African Republic.
Image: Imago/imagebroker
Donor profiles: Russia and Turkey
Russia's re-emerging foreign aid program focuses on health and education and is considered a by-product of its familiarity with the medical and school systems of its development partners in the former Soviet Union. However, Western sanctions over Ukraine begin to take their toll. In Turkey, things look brighter: Ankara's ODA rose more than threefold to $3.4 billion between 2010 and 2014 alone.
Changing of the guards?
The Devex report looked at funding strategies and priorities of eight emerging donors: the BRICS economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) as well as South Korea, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. At the 2017 BRICS meeting last month in China, the emerging donors urged "developed countries to honor their Official Development Assistance commitments in time and in full."
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Focus close to home
Even as they contend that their foreign aid programs have global ambitions, emerging donors generally direct the vast majority of their funding toward neighboring regions. India, UAE and South Africa have a particularly sharp focus on their home regions. China, Russia and South Korea are the exceptions to this trend.
Peace building, democracy and governance
Albeit having considerably lower aid flows than its peers, South Africa has been aggressively positioning itself as an emerging donor over the past decade, directing nearly all its budget to the continent — 70 percent alone goes towards the Southern part of Africa. According to the Devex report, priorities are peace building, democracy and governance as well as humanitarian assistance.
