This report explores colonial continuities in German development cooperation. Drawing on practitioner insights and comparative country cases it outlines recommendations
Colonial continuities in Germany’s development cooperation persist as structural arrangements, not as intent. Addressing them can turn the world’s largest and one of the most differentiated bilateral development interfaces into a site of genuine co-creation for international cooperation projects – in the interest of both the cooperation partner and Germany itself. As the 2026 reform plan by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) points out, “German development policy holds itself to the aim of recognising and dismantling colonial continuities” (BMZ, 2026). This report presents research findings and recommendations from the four levels of the project lifecycle to support this aim.
These four levels include:
Section pointers (§) and chapter indications (Ch) refer to the full report.
Colonial continuities are structural and persistent. They are neither a matter of intent, which today’s practitioners may disavow and refuse, nor marginal. They exist across the structural, institutional and interpersonal levels of development cooperation, in arrangements that look procedurally neutral: who authors project concepts, whose expertise counts, whose signature a decision needs, which language the documents are presented in (§2.2).
They surface explicitly along the project life cycle, from government negotiations that set the terms, to scoping, design and implementation, through to evaluation (Ch5).
Technical fixes alone only reinscribe the arrangement. An ‘aid-effectiveness’ reading patches gaps. Instead, reading a project’s life cycle through the coloniality of development – the specific ways in which the coloniality of power, knowledge and being (Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013, 2020) are experienced in development coordination – turns the 10 recommendations made in the report into levers of change, rather than a checklist (§2.4; Ch5).
The report’s recommendations are practitioner-grounded and multi-level. They were informed by 22 in-depth interviews, three focus groups, three workshops with some 60 participants including senior staff from the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ), and a GIZ Postcolonial Academy webinar with over 800 participants. Each recommendation carries action at every level of the development hierarchy, top-down and bottom-up (§1.6).
The moment is strategically opportune. Germany is now the largest bilateral donor, and the BMZ can be described as the last development ministry standing. In a multipolar moment in which partners ask for co-design, addressing colonial continuities is the path to genuine co-creation, in both parties’ interest. This is an invitation to redesign the German development interface for the co-creation and co-implementation of projects with partners across the Global South. The report’s recommendations offer key first steps based on practitioner experience across development institutions, not a final roadmap (Ch1).
This policy brief, and the accompanying APRI report, are an invitation, addressed primarily to practitioners at every level of the German development interface. They are the agents best placed to see where the continuities operate, and the ones who the recommendations invite to action. These are not an attack on German development cooperation, nor a verdict on the people who staff it. The report holds to one distinction throughout. It distinguishes between problematic structures and the practitioners who work within them: frequently good-willed, certainly not ill-intended, caught in arrangements they did not design. Enacting all 10 recommendations would not mean that colonial continuities are fully addressed. The report offers no exhaustive checklist, but key first steps, identified by practitioners within the institutions.
The report and its recommendations can build on prior initiatives addressing colonial continuities. Respondents point to several starting points: select AIZ trainings that address the issue (Ch. 5.7); recent movement of national staff into senior roles (Ch. 5.7); a 2021 internal stock-taking of racism initiated by the staff who experience it, and a staff-driven post-colonial transformation initiative (Ch. 1.7); and the diaspora programmes WIDU and MEG (Ch. 4). Beyond GIZ, church-based organisations co-develop evaluation questions with partners and assess in national-evaluator tandems, and in some cases make anti-racism and decoloniality training compulsory from the start of a contract (Ch. 5.6; Ch. 5.10).
These are first steps within development cooperation, which, however reformed, remains a different instrument from reparative justice, with different obligations (§2.1.12; §3.11). There is reason on both sides to take these steps: partners are asking for co-creation, and in a multipolar moment, the donors able to offer it are the ones that stay relevant. Germany’s differentiated cooperation structures are well suited to this, once the continuities that constrain them are addressed – and acting on it serves Germany’s own interest as much as its partners’ (Ch1).
Is this the moment, amid contestation and cuts, to engage in this work? International cooperation matters; making its interface more capable, diversified and self-reflective is worth the effort.
German development policy is currently being reframed around explicit national interests. Treat that reframing as an opening rather than a retreat: an honest, interest-based starting point can become a genuinely two-way exchange, provided that partners have the same room to state and pursue their own interests.
Reshape the biennial government negotiations (the Regierungsverhandlungen) and the consultations between them (the Regierungskonsultationen) accordingly. These discussions should be less pre-scripted by German positions, more attuned to the partner’s strategic priorities, better prepared on both sides, and with open reflection on the colonial continuities built in from the start rather than added at the end.
In parallel, strengthen the practical coordination between the ministries and the consular sections that the negotiations depend on. Begin renegotiating – where feasible – the framework agreements and the bilateral technical cooperation treaties (the TZ-Abkommen), some still dating to the 1960s, into instruments that reflect 2026 rather than 1967.
By moving away from lengthy negotiation protocols and towards compact table formats, the BMZ reform process is already making important steps in this direction. This recommendation builds on the intent to pursue bi-directional exchange, and adds further levers across the levels of hierarchy.
Grounded in: practitioners problematise the government negotiations that open each cooperation cycle. A senior country lead describes a recent round in which an African partner delegation was told, at short notice, to obtain visas if they still wished to attend; some did not attend as a result – while the same partners had shortly before been received elsewhere in Europe with “the golden carpet rolled out” (interview 11). Practitioners describe negotiation scripts they must “learn how to script … differently,” since “there are at least forty years of tradition in there” (interview 12). A senior African development professional describes the form as “top-down … dictated from Berlin,” with “in fact no negotiation,” connecting the inertia to framework agreements from the 1960s–70s that have never been updated (interview 15).
Make the chain of German strategic reasoning legible to national staff – how an African regional or country strategy connects to a programme, a programme to a project, and daily work to the strategy’s wider political purpose. Consult national staff on strategy, not only on implementation. The strategic reasoning is more accessible to staff on German contracts than to national staff, who sit several steps further down from where it is written and often meet a second barrier in the documents themselves, which are usually in German and therefore legible only to some. Co-conception is the goal to move towards, where scoping today remains largely top-down.
Locate the change where strategy is actually formed: at scoping, at the co-conception of a project, and at the annual partner steering committees and operational planning. This does not happen at the donor reporting cycle, which is an administrative step downstream and no substitute for shared design.
Build the consultative practice that a peer European agency already runs as routine, in which national professionals are actively brought into the analysis, rather than left to consult documents if and when they are shared.
Grounded in: practitioners contrast a peer European agency, where national professionals get the full strategic picture in advance and can shape a programme as it is designed: “they fetch all of us on board” (interview 08). By contrast, German work is “dictated from Berlin” and national staff may enter it with no insight into strategy and “with no context” given to them (interviews 08, 15). When interfacing with national ministries, national staff are asked questions they cannot answer because the strategic reasoning has not reached them (interview 02), and strategic documents reach them only when it suits management rather than as a matter of course (interview 17).
Different contractual and legal regimes will, and should, continue to coexist in a German implementing organisation. Internationally recruited staff on the German pay tariff are bound to that tariff, while locally contracted staff fall under national labour law. The defensible issue is not that the two regimes coexist but that the choice of which one to invoke tends to track the direction of advantage: local labour law cited where it lowers an entitlement, German standards where they would raise one. Because local law sets a floor and not a ceiling, the organisation always has the discretion to do more than the legal minimum.
End the selective citation; align the standards that can be aligned such as annual leave (nothing in local labour law forbids the same number of leave days that German contracts carry), maternity leave and parental protection; and make the market benchmarking that justifies staff terms transparent. The aim is not to claim that internationally and locally contracted posts are equivalent, but to apply the same standards wherever discretion allows them to be the same. Alongside the standards themselves, give locally contracted staff worldwide a representative body with standing at headquarters. While this cannot replicate the works council that staff on German contracts have, which exists under German law, it can approximate its function as a channel for national staff voice without carrying the same statutory standing.
Grounded in:some respondents describe entitlements pitched below what would be possible, by invoking the precedent that justifies the lower option – “[a] selective reference … when it suits them” (interview 03); and, on pay, a benchmark built from organisations selected to keep national pay low, which national-staff representatives put as “they go for those organisations that favour them” (interview 09).
German staff posted abroad receive country preparation (Landeskunde), a pre-departure briefing on the country and its culture, and the in-house Academy for International Cooperation (AIZ) already offers modules that reach into colonial and post-colonial themes. Two things are missing. First, make colonial history and continuities a systematic, critical part of mandatory pre-departure preparation – not a standalone optional module that a line manager can ration away by withholding the work time. Second, build a genuine parallel induction for incoming national staff into German organisational culture, communication styles and the history of Germany’s development cooperation.
The asymmetry to correct is not the ‘both sides lack training’ approach. Outgoing German staff get Landeskunde, while incoming national staff get nothing comparable to help them prepare for the German context they must work inside – a context that otherwise operates as the unspoken, self-evident norm against which everything else must be explained. The case is not only fairness: a programme’s relational and historical groundwork holds only if both sides arrive equipped, which makes this a matter of professional competence for effective cooperation. Make these competences count in recruitment criteria and job descriptions, not only in preparation after the fact. Anchor both objectives at the project’s start.
Grounded in: incoming national staff receive a technical-only induction, with no equivalent of the country preparation German staff get before posting; the awareness should run both ways, since national staff too need to understand “the logic of the company” on colonial and post-colonial issues, and a historical grounding helps one know “what kind of institutions you are entering into” (interviews 02, 08). Some AIZ modules on colonial and post-colonial themes are well-taught but “not mandatory whatsoever,” unlike the recurring compulsory compliance and data-security training (interview 02).
Recognise practitioners from the diaspora and their distinctive professional expertise – people who often bring a consciousness of shared histories and responsibilities, a connection to communities of origin, and a context-awareness that moves between German and Global South realities. Be clear that these capacities are acquired through exposure and practice, not given by country of origin (the recognition must not slide into essentialism).
The structural obstacle is an issue of definition. The TZ-FZ-Leitlinie, the 2021 for technical and financial cooperation, which governs who may be deployed, defines a “posted” expert (entsandte Fachkraft) in terms that route dual nationals and diaspora practitioners out of posted roles in their countries of origin. This is based on an implicit presumption of divided loyalty, while a German who has lived in a partner country for years is unproblematically “posted”.
Revise that definition. Create a diaspora consultative body with a mandate from the political level (on the model of the French FORIM) and bring diaspora consultation into strategic design. Ease the structural preconditions that gate funding for diaspora-led organisations (e.g. the registered association (e.V.)). Lastly, mainstream the lessons of existing German diaspora programmes (such as MEG and WIDU) for broader cooperation with the diaspora before they disperse at project closure.
Grounded in: the deployment definition routes diaspora and dual-national practitioners out of posted roles in their country of origin; colleagues report being asked whether they would give up a partner- country citizenship to be hired as national rather than posted staff (interview 15). The in-between position is an asset, not a liability – one practitioner describes being able to “see certain things that both other sides might not see, especially with racial hierarchy” (interview 17), a fluency acquired through exposure, not origin.
Much of the work of addressing colonial continuities is done as discretionary, individual, unrecognised effort – voluntarily, on the side in addition to people’s actual jobs. Turn it into recognised, evaluable practice. Make it a yearly goal in the implementing organisation’s annual planning, broken down to country level as a professional requirement (fachliche Anforderung) rather than a matter of personal attitude (Haltung). Worded appropriately, the requirement would recognise a set of competencies required to do this work.
Reform the managers feedback instrument – the upward appraisal through which staff rate their managers – so that a manager who pushes for change and requests staff engagement with issues around colonial continuities (e.g. in drafting or assessing projects) is not marked down for it. At the working level, recognise the voluntary inclusion work that staff already do, and reduce its burden through the companion language and peer-support recommendations, rather than simply adding more designated time on top.
Grounded in: the work of addressing colonial continuities is done voluntarily, on top of a full job (interview 04), and at the working level shows up as a steady tax of unassigned extra effort (interview 17). The upward leadership-feedback instrument can mark down managers who push back on colonial-sounding drafts (interview 12). Practitioners therefore propose setting the expectation “not only as an attitude, but as a professional matter,” mandated from above (interview 12).
Address three linked workplace patterns: (1) senior national staff whose clearance (signing) authority is capped below that of junior European colleagues; (2) the structural deprioritising of national staff retention and progression; and (3) a missing shared definition of racist conduct that can undergird an extension of the existing whistleblower and sexual misconduct reporting structure to cover racist misconduct as well.
Grounded in: some senior national staff hold signing authority capped below that of junior European colleagues (interview 02), and the institution loses national staff who “are good at their work” to a glass ceiling that offers no pathway up (interview 13). A dismissive attitude toward the African context surfaces in overheard remarks such as “too much Afrika” (interview 15) – conduct that currently has neither a shared definition nor a reporting channel. The elected representation forums, meanwhile, remain constrained (interviews 02, 05, 09, 17).
At certain points in the workflow, the institution’s working language becomes German and from that point on, the staff who do not work in German lose access to information they should be able to contribute to. Stop treating translation as a favour done by bilingual staff and make it an institutional workflow step. Restructure communication and reporting so that national expertise can feed into project design, reporting and headquarters/ministry communication without requiring individual bilingual staff
members to act as informal translators.
Specify precisely where German is genuinely required (legally binding texts) and lift it everywhere it is not.
Make partner-relevant language fluency a hiring requirement where the role requires it – not only English/German but French/German and other language combinations. Apply that requirement to consultants and to the report-receiving ministry staff whose own limited English language competence is part of the reason that double-language reporting persists.
Grounded in: the everyday exclusion the language ceiling produces – a German-only document with “important information in it” shared so that “half of the people cannot read it” (interview 17), and framework agreements available only in German (interview 15). Practitioners propose a “directive from above” to fix it (interview 15); and the project-level variance shows it can be fixed – a supportive run of managers has run bilingual reporting in practice (interview 01), even as the translation burden today falls on bilingual staff as voluntary work (interview 17).
Much of the work that keeps national and minoritised staff in post and surfaces problems from below is carried out in informal peer-support spaces, or in an elected representation forum constrained by contract precarity. Give these existing platforms standing and protection. Recognise the staff-run peer-support spaces as legitimate organisational practice with designated work time – not as mere informal social activity.
Strengthen the elected national staff representation forum (the RCNP) by adding a senior-to-new mentoring layer, so that longer-serving national staff can pass on their knowledge of how to read the Institution.
Protect those who represent others and who raise concerns – contract security for elected representatives and for participants on fixed-term contracts – so that pushing for change is not a career risk borne only by those who can afford it. Preserve the self-selected character of the groups rather than bureaucratising the form away.
Grounded in: the general pattern that such initiatives endure only by securing leadership backing, given the external political pressure they can attract (interview 18). A practitioner ties that backing to the agenda: dealing with colonial history “is what we as an institution need clear backing for” (interview 04). The spaces themselves are staff-made and valued – a peer-support space lets staff “share experiences … so you don’t feel alone” (interview 17), and the staff diversity initiatives were founded bottom-up, by staff members themselves (interviews 15, 18).
Evaluation is the final stage of the project cycle, and the colonial continuities identified here mirror the previous project life cycle phases. It is led by evaluators from the donor country, set up mainly to justify spending to the donor’s taxpayers, and judged by Eurocentric standard criteria. The aim is to make evaluation a shared and learning-oriented practice.
Four concrete changes are required to achieve this:
Grounded in: practitioners describe evaluation as donor-led, set up to “show the successes in order to secure funding again” so that critical points “do not appear” (interview 19) – an account corroborated in interview 08, where reports are written to fit the funding incentive, made to “look good” even where that “may not be entirely the case on the ground.” Partner “capacity” is reframed from “they don’t know evaluation” to “our bureaucracy is arcane and has to be learned” (interview 19). Church-based organisations evaluate differently: they co-develop evaluation questions with partners and work in national-evaluator tandems, in contrast to other institutional practices described as “top-down, German” (interview 19).
Joshua Kwesi Aikins is a Senior Fellow and head of the Economy and Society Programme. He is a political scientist who studied, researched and worked in both Germany and Ghana.
Amara is a project coordinator for the Decolonizing Development project within the Economy and Society programme. Previously, she managed projects at Global Solutions Initiative in Berlin.
