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Dr. Christoph Kohlmeyer
Co-Chair, Global Donor Platform for Rural Development
Head of Division, Rural Development and Food Security, Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), Bonn
Global Donor Platform must “feed lessons learned back into members’ operations”
Nater: What’s the Platform contributing?
Kohlmeyer: To start with, more advocacy on behalf of our mission. It's precisely the rural poor who are least able to draw attention to themselves and have almost no-one to speak for them. This is a role the Platform must play. Our joint paper,  The role of agriculture and rural development in achieving the Millennium Development Goals, has already had some impact, and we will follow up with lots more.
Twenty-six donors speaking out in unison is hugely more significant than each donor doing it separately. As we learn to communicate our message more professionally, our success in getting political decision makers to rethink things will only grow. Our group has natural authority. We must bring that to bear, also by adding our voice more forcefully to the debate on agricultural policy coherence that I spoke earlier about.
Even then, as the doors to more effective rural and agricultural development start to open again, we won’t have much time to start demonstrating success and concrete results. First of all, we must devise common strategies and consensus on methods and entry points, as well as agreement on which policies work and which don’t. Second, we have to learn how to cooperate better, to trust each other and to utilise the Platform’s comparative advantage in a targeted way.
“Our group has natural authority. We must bring that to bear.”
Where does shared learning come in?
Take agricultural extension. We argued throughout the 1990s amongst ourselves for more than ten years about the right approach, thus depriving our partner countries of their right to decide for themselves while at the same time forcing through a bunch of competing approaches that rarely lasted very long because these countries had no ownership of them. That was a lost decade for agricultural advisory systems, and, in many countries today, there’s nothing left of them anymore.
For me, the work of the Neuchâtel Initiative is a great example of how to do things better: Based on a set of principles on transparency and client-orientation for country-by-country adaptation, this group came out with a modern, cutting-edge, participatory approach to rural extension. There’s growing consensus around these things now. Rural development is chock-full of difficult issues and policies that can only show progress if we start elaborating principles, strategies and methods together and in cooperation with relevant parties in developing countries. This is how we in the Global Donor Platform intend to go about formulating our Joint Donor Rural Concept.
The Platform’s third ‘pillar’ is donor harmonisation and alignment in developing countries. When will we see results here?
Actively learning from Global Donor Platform’s pilot projects in Nicaragua, Burkina Faso, Tanzania and Cambodia means feeding the lessons learned back into our membership’s operations. My vision is that, in these four countries and in two years time, we donors will already be acting as a single development partner, wholeheartedly supporting our partner countries’ strategies.
But this also means seizing the opportunities emerging from the new aid architecture and putting them to efficient use. Our joint research projects on the rural focus of poverty-reduction strategies and sector-wide approaches to rural development will sharpen our understanding of the most effective and efficient levers to apply to accelerate our advance in the battle against poverty and hunger in rural areas.
 More on the BMZ's Division of Rural Development and Food Security
Photos: Stephan Steenken
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