Development cooperation – Supporting sustainable development

Taken from the official translation of the German Sustainable Development Strategy

The data on which the indicator is based are the statistics on German official development assistance which are compiled by the Federal Statistical Office on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. Whether a flow is counted as ODA is determined by guidelines issued by the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC). ODA comprises public funds spent in order to advance the economic and social development of developing countries. It primarily includes expenditure for financial and technical cooperation with developing countries, humanitarian aid and development-cooperation contributions to multilateral institutions such as the United Nations, the European Union, the World Bank or regional development banks. Under certain conditions, spending on peace missions, debt relief and certain items of development expenditure in the donor country – such as tuition costs for students from developing countries, domestic spending on refugees and funding for development-related research – can also be counted as ODA.

The DAC also defines the list of developing countries eligible for ODA. This includes the least developed countries (LDCs) as well as other countries with low and medium per capita GNI. As a rule, the list is updated every three years. Changes in the indicator may therefore be the result of one or more countries being added to or removed from the list.

In 2018, there was a change in the way ODA loans are evaluated, in that the previous net-flows principle was replaced by the grant-equivalent method. In this method, only the grant element of an ODA loan, once calculated, is counted as ODA. The intention behind the new methodology is to make ODA grants and ODA loans comparable.

As calculated using the new method, Germany’s ODA came to EUR 21.6 billion in 2019, slightly higher than the EUR 21.2 billion recorded for 2018. In both years, ODA accounted for 0.61% of Germany’s GNI. For comparison, net ODA spending (using the evaluation method that was standard until 2017) came to around EUR 21.5 billion in 2019. This represented a 1% drop from the previous year’s figure of EUR 21.8 billion.

On the international scale, in 2019 Germany was once again the second-largest contributor in absolute terms, after the United States and ahead of the UK (provisional figures). Germany’s ODA: GNI ration of 0.61% was higher than the average for EU members of the DAC, which was 0.48% according to the provisional figures. Germany had the sixth-highest ODA: GNI ratio among the 29 members of the DAC. According to the provisional figures for 2019, the international target of 0.7% was met by five DAC countries: Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the UK.

In addition to official development cooperation, private funds are also provided by such organisations as churches, foundations and associations.

These chiefly take the form of contributions and donations. This private development cooperation, which does not affect the ODA figures, amounted to EUR 1.36 billion in 2019, the equivalent of a 0.04% share of GNI. Private direct investment in developing countries came to EUR 10.2 billion in 2019, according to the preliminary data.

This summary table illustrates the evaluations of the indicator by status of previous years. This shows whether the weather symbol for an indicator has been stable or rather volatile in the past years. (Evaluations from the indicator report 2021)

Indicator	17.1 Official development assistance as a proportion of gross national income
Target	Increase the proportion to 0.7% of gross national income by 2030
Year	2014	2015	2016	2017
Evaluation