Trilateral Cooperation
The context for development cooperation has changed rapidly over the last years. Today, developing countries face new, complex challenges due to a faster changing international environment and globalisation. At the same time, some countries have emerged as important global players with own development cooperation activities. As a result, development cooperation by Western countries has to take into account new modalities in their development cooperation. One of these new instruments is trilateral cooperation, which aims at bringing together the comparative advantages of Germany and an emerging country for the benefit of developing countries.
Learning from South Africa
Since South Africa’s successful transition to democracy in 1994, the country’s political and economic influence has grown tremendously throughout the rest of the continent. South Af-rica’s transformation process has become a valuable repository of experience with regard to social, economic and political change from which lessons can be learned. Several African countries have therefore approached the South African Government for assistance to strengthen their democratic structures and to effect social and economic change. For many years, South African government institutions showed a clear commitment to increasing their involvement in other African countries; however, activities were often carried out on an ad-hoc basis with limited coordination and strategic orientation.
Strengthening the Partner
Against this backdrop and recognising South Africa’s status as an economic powerhouse in the region, the South African and German Governments established a Trilateral Cooperation (TriCo) Fund in order to jointly assist third countries and regional initiatives in development activities as well as support the establishment of development cooperation capacities in South Africa.
Currently the TriCo Fund supports five South African projects in the region:
- The Fire Management and Coordination Project in Tanzania,
- the Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Development (PCRD) Project in the Democratic Republic of Congo,
- the African Ombudsman Research Centre Project in South Africa
- the Networking and Capacity Building Project for Articulation of African Interests in Global Economic Governance Forums and
- a regional project on Performance M&E in Africa
Within the Fire Management Coordination Project, South African and German experts support Tanzania in the improvement of community-based fire management and in the set up of a Fire Coordination Centre, which will provide Tanzania with valuable early-warning information on fire hazards.
The PCRD Project supports the South African Government in coordinating and strategically orientating its various engagements in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Furthermore, the TriCo Fund supports the establishment of an African Ombudsman Research Centre as a knowledge hub and training centre for ombudsmen in their role as mediators and guardians of the principles of good governance in their respective countries.
The aim of the fourth project is to support the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) in partnership with the University of Pretoria in initiating and coordinating an African network of policy-makers and think-tanks conducting analytical work to support South Africa in voicing African interests at global economic governance forums like the G20 Summit.
Finally, the TriCo Fund supports a project which aims to develop a shared understanding in Africa around performance monitoring and evaluation. The project will conduct different workshops with policy makers from six African countries to share South African experience on performance monitoring and evaluation.
Two projects have recently been completed: a project on anti-corruption in the Democratic Republic of Congo and a project on the training of police oversight bodies.
Benefiting all
The TriCo Fund projects have helped strengthen South African institutions in their capacity to implement results-oriented and sustainable South-South cooperation projects. Through the TriCo Fund, both South Africa and Germany have provided visible contributions to the development of the continent as equal partners. This impact is best demonstrated by the two completed projects. One of these was an anti-corruption summit which was held in the Democratic Republic of Congo and which, for the first time, brought together more than 400 participants from civil society as well as local, provincial and national government. This event led to the establishment of an anti-corruption strategy, thereby fulfilling an important component of South Africa’s commitment to promoting good governance in the DRC.
The second was the project on training police oversight bodies, which strengthened the investigation capacities of 160 people from seven different oversight institutions across four countries, along with representatives from the police and civil society. Owing to the project’s success, the African Policing Civilian Oversight Forum (APCOF) is currently investigating means of rolling the training programme out across the continent.
The mutual partnership in Trilateral Projects is benefiting all three partners – it supports the development in the third country or region, deepens Germany’s engagement in Africa’s development and finally strengthens South Africa in its endeavours to give a development impetus to the region.
Contact
Daniel Werner
Trilateral Cooperation (TriCo) Fund
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH
Email: daniel.werner@giz.de