In Germany, the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) leads in coordinating the government’s bilateral development policy priorities and positions. These are then operationalised and carried out in the form of distinct interventions by implementing agencies. Since a number of key reforms in the first decade of the 2000s, two main agencies have been involved in implementing Germany’s financial and technical cooperation: the KfW Group (Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau Bankengruppe) and Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ).
Within the KfW Group there are three main actors: the KfW Development Bank, as the German public development bank; the German Investment and Development Company (DEG, ‘Deutsche Investitions- und Entwicklungsgesellschaft GmbH’), as the German development finance institution; and the KfW IPEX-Bank, focused on international projects and export finance. Although in a formal sense Germany maintains a sharp organisational distinction between financial and technical cooperation, the increasing focus on blended finance and current policy priorities have meant that in practice the lines between financial and technical cooperation instruments are increasingly blurred.
Read the case study here.
Authors: Benedikt Erforth and Niels Keijzer German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS)
Acknowledgements: The authors would like to thank the people interviewed for this study and San Bilal for his comments.
ETTG study conducted for the Practitioners’ Network for European Development Cooperation.
This study is part of a series of analyses covering 8 European case studies (Germany, France, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, the European Investment Bank -EIB and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development – EBRD) as well as a synthesis report.
Presentation of the analysis report here.
Photo by Maheshkumar Painam on Unsplash.
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