Middle East / North Africa and the Millennium Development Goals ...

5.5 Implementation of MDG8
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Markus Loewe
The balance of German policy with respect to implementing MDG8 is a
mixed one. On the one hand, Germany is strongly committed to the interests
of the developing countries. On the other hand, Germany still has
much work to do in adapting the scope and orientation of its ODA to the
commitments made in recent years.
The industrialized countries bear the chief responsibility for most of the
targets of MDG8. There are limits to what bilateral DC can do to reaching
them. All of German’s external policies are therefore called upon to do
their part. More than in the case of all other MDGs, MDG8 calls for coherence
between all of the external policies of the donor countries, mutual
coordination between them, and complementarity between their policies
and the policies of developing countries. The member countries of the
European Union (EU) must also take steps to ensure that their polices are
coherent with the policies pursued by the Commission.
Accordingly, Germany’s contribution to reaching MDG8 cannot be analyzed
for individual developing countries or regions (e.g. for the Middle
East and North Africa; it instead must be viewed exclusively in the larger
context, i.e. with all its impacts at the global level.
In some sectors Germany has made crucial contributions to ensuring that
progress is in fact made in implementing MDG8. This goes in particular
for international environmental policy and debt relief for heavily indebted
poor countries (HIPCs):
– Debt relief (Targets 13 and 15): The German government, which has
since repeatedly come out in favor of accelerating and enlarging the
debt-relief process, played an instrumental role in bringing about the
HIPC Initiative adopted by the G7 at the 1999 Cologne debt summit.
In the MENA region Mauritania has benefited from the initiative.
Above and beyond the HIPC Initiative, Germany has cancelled its bilateral
debt with a good number of countries, which means that today
most HIPCs are without debt with Germany. The main beneficiaries
in the MENA region have been Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, which have
been relieved of a substantial share of their German debt (Bundesregierung
2004, 15).
– Good global governance (Target 12): Germany has come out emphatically
for an efficiency-oriented reform of the UN system. It has
German Development Institute