The Chair of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Brian Atwood, congratulated Germany's Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) on the progress the Ministry has made since the 2010 OECD peer review. He said that Germany's commitment was commensurate with the country's role as one of the largest donor nations and its leadership in many areas of international development.

Enlarge image A resident apportions corn meal provided by the WFP, Nairobi (© picture-alliance/dpa) Development Minister Dirk Niebel commented, "We have achieved good results and have made changes that have enhanced our work. We consider the recommendations made by the peer review as further motivation for our efforts to continuously improve Germany's development cooperation."

Since the 2010 peer review by other DAC members, which analysed the various areas of Germany's development policy, the BMZ has been able to achieve many important implementation goals within a short period. For example, it successfully completed the largest structural reform in the history of German development policy when it merged the implementing agencies GTZ, InWEnt and DED in 2011.

It also published its overall political strategy for development cooperation, "Chancen schaffen – Minds for Change. Zukunft entwickeln – Enhancing Opportunities", and the German government presented its inter-ministerial Strategy Paper on Africa. Both documents make important contributions toward the realisation of the Millennium Development Goals and toward poverty reduction.

With a view to making Germany's bilateral development cooperation more effective, the German government also reduced the number of its bilateral cooperation partners from 57 to 50. All these are milestones for the improvement of Germany's development cooperation, which has met with praise from Brian Atwood.