The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) is a coordinating body of the major bilateral donors which seeks to improve the effectiveness of development cooperation. The DAC’s work focuses on three areas: (1) the setting of quality standards for development cooperation and the uniform...

The success of development policy partly depends on the effects of other policies which – intentionally or unintentionally – may support, but also impair, development cooperation efforts. Development policy must therefore bear other policies in mind in order to prevent incoherence and...

The international community of official development aid donors currently comprises 37 countries (bilateral donors) and some 30 international organizations (multilateral donors). This multiplicity of donors, many with projects, programmes, interests, concepts, structures and procedures of their...

The Paris Declaration (PD), adopted in 2005, lays down principles and procedures for enhancing the effectiveness of aid and specifies them in twelve targets supplied with monitorable indicators and to be achieved by 2010. The PD thereby clearly enlarges the international regulatory framework...

In 2005, the previous Federal Government had signalled that it would improve the linkage between financial and technical cooperation to make Germany’s development cooperation more efficient and effective. This had not been followed through. Germany’s official development assistance (ODA) has...

In December 2012, the OECD's Development Assistance Committee (DAC) celebrated 50 years of reviewing its members' development cooperation. The reviews form part of the DAC's initial mandate, which called for an increase in resources for development, an improvement in their effectiveness and...

The development cooperation (DC) of the United Nations (UN) at the end of the 1990s can be described and assessed as follows: • The UN is an important pillar of multilateral DC. The organization is endowed with some fundamental presuppositions (universality, a high level of legitimation, good...

For sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) the year 2005 offers a number of important opportunities for political action (G8 summit; debate on the report on the Commission for Africa – CFA; review of the progress made on achieving the Millennium Development Goals – MDGs). On the one hand, this is a chance...

Sub-Saharan Africa comprises 48 states at various stages of social, economic and political development. Despite the heterogeneity of these countries, the following general developments relating to statehood and governance in the past 15 years can at least be identified: Such pan-African...