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Contributions from
the Column
Facts and trends
African churches find it difficult to deal with AIDS
Somalia
BMZ suggests utilising new dynamism in Africa
Development assistance rising
“The trade in used capital goods must be regulated”
Austrian Development Agency starts working
Expert discussion: Speed up poverty reduction
40th GDI training course
3/2004
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[ Expert discussion: Speed up poverty reduction ]
The theatre director comes on stage and shouts “Fire!”. But the audience does not stir because they believe the warning is part of the play. Rupert Neudeck, former head of Cap Anamur aid agency, uses this Kierkegaard anecdote to caricature the ritual by which politicians react to warnings that the Millennium Development Goal of halving world poverty by 2015 will be missed if not more is done to achieve it. According to Neudeck, the Bundestag (Germany’s Federal Parliament) must step in. Neudeck was speaking at an expert discussion of Action 2015, which was initiated by him and Winfried Pinger, former development policy spokesman of the Christian Democratic Bundestag faction. Franz Nuscheler, former Director of the Duisburg-based Institute for Peace and Development, demanded that development issues be hauled out of the “irrelevancy trap”. He prophesied the “ultimate bankruptcy” of development policy if the Millennium Development Goal was not achieved. Various delegates dismissed as “bogus” the German Development Ministry’s avowals that over 70 per cent of its development efforts was “poverty-oriented”. They said it could not be seen what the Action 2015 programme had achieved so far. Karin Kortmann, development policy spokeswoman of the Social Democratic Party Bundestag faction, said an implementation plan must be put in place to clarify priorities. She also complained that Parliamentary collaboration on development policy concepts was insufficient. Political science professor Peter Molt, of the University of Trier, pointed to the precarious situation in sub-Saharan Africa. In his view, all current initiatives – including NEPAD – suffer from the fact that they presuppose functioning states while in some African regions there hardly are any. However, a special fund for Africa with its own allocation guidelines and the priority areas of basic education and local development would be promising. Johannes Wendt
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