Greg Armstrong
With $16 billion in 1,700 ongoing technical cooperation projects, and more than 19,000 staff working in 130 countries, GIZ is one of the world’s biggest technical cooperation implementing agencies. This article reviews the GIZ role in German international development assistance and, GIZ policies on Results-Based Management, Monitoring and Evaluation.
Who This is For: Project Managers, Bid Managers
Level of Difficulty: Moderate to complex
Most useful: Guidelines on designing and using a results-based monitoring system (RBM system)
The size
and scope of German International Assistance
According to
Donor Tracker in 2017 Germany was the second
largest donor for international development assistance in gross amounts
disbursed.
Even given the fact that the $
24.7 billion budget for international assistance included roughly $6 billion
for refugee related expenditures, this still makes Germany in gross terms the
biggest donor in Europe, and the second biggest in the world. It ranked 6th in Europe in terms of % of GNI contributed.
Germany is
also the largest contributor to the
European Development Fund, the largest
component of EU-administered development assistance.
The two
largest components of this development assistance are managed by
KfW Development Bank and its subsidiary DEG, the German Investment Corporation and
BMZ – the Ministry of Economic
Cooperation and Development.
The Role and Function of BMZ
While much of this German ODA was managed by KfW Development Bank, and other government Ministries, BMZ - The Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development, administered the largest portion of the budget -roughly 37% of the ODA budget in 2017, and that was predicted to rise to 49% ( $10.7 billion) in 2018.
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2018 Budget Allocations - BMZ
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The largest component of the BMZ aid budget in 2018 was allocated to
bilateral development cooperation.
Of the 8.5 billion Euro ($US 9.5 billion administered by BMZ, in 2017 several billion was provided for
financial cooperation, some through the European Union’s aid mechanisms, some to the World
Bank, and the regional development banks, to foundations and civil society organizations. Some was
also provided to a wide range of United Nations agencies.
Germany is, for example, the
largest government contributor to the UNDP.
And Germany supported close to 2,000 UNDP projects through UNDP regular resources and another 113 UNDP projects directly in 2017.
GIZ, as an implementing agency itself received roughly 2.6 billion Euros (close to $3 billion) in 2017, roughly 2.5 billion coming from BMZ and other German ministries, the rest from organizations such as the European Union, U.N. agencies, foundations or private sector companies, for the implementation of technical cooperation activities and between 2015-2017 was the largest recipient of Europeaid contracts, and although no longer the single largest recipient in January 2019 remained in the top 3.
The Role of GIZ as an Implementing Agency
