Germany

Country Profile

Germany’s current coalition government under the leadership of Chancellor Angela Merkel was elected in October 2009 and consists of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Free Democratic Party (FDP). The Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) is led by Dr. Dirk Niebel together with his State Secretary Hans-Jürgen Beerfelzt and Parliamentary State Secretary Gudrun Kopp. According to the coalition treaty, the BMZ has identified four key sectors of German development cooperation: education, rural development, good governance, and health.

Since the elections in 2009, the German government has shown strong political and financial commitment to RH/FP regarding both bilateral cooperation and on an international level. After the G8 Summit in 2010, the government announced that it would contribute €400 million to the Muskoka Initiative on Maternal, Newborn and Child Health. As part of this commitment, the German government launched the so-called Initiative on Rights-Based Family Planning and Maternal Health, which aims to double Germany’s financial bilateral commitment to €80 million annually and to set RH/FP prominently on the international development agenda in the next five years.

The Initiative will focus on three goals: increasing knowledge on and acceptance of contraceptives; increasing access to knowledge on family planning methods; and increasing the number of births attended by skilled birth attendants. Furthermore, a particular political focus will be to strengthen the linkage between family planning and education programmes and fostering civil society and private-sector engagement.

Key challenges are a stagnating or even decreasing development budget in the coming years and the artificial political decision to spend one third of German aid multilaterally and two thirds bilaterally, which threatens funding for multilateral organisations working in the field of RH/FP.

Here you can find more information on Germany’s policies, programmes and projects in the health sector.

Key Documents