Nine Billion No One Asked About

An inconspicuous parliamentary inquiry revealed a list of more than 450 overseas projects totaling approximately €9.8 billion. Development loans, federal guarantees, and funding programs whose actual impact even government evaluators often cannot adequately measure. Meanwhile, Germany has forgiven €15.56 billion in debt over 25 years. As bridges deteriorate, municipalities struggle financially, and social benefits face cuts at home, billions continue to flow abroad. Michael Hollister raises a fundamental question: Should a government distribute money it does not have?

by Michael Hollister
Exclusive published at Michael Hollister on October 25, 2026

5.052 words * about 27 minutes readingtime

It was a routine inquiry. In late 2023, the CDU/CSU parliamentary group wanted to know how Germany supports the development of statistical systems in developing countries. It was a dry subject, one of hundreds of minor interpellations submitted each year that hardly anyone reads amid the daily business of parliament. The government responded on December 06, 2023, in Bundestag Printed Paper 20/9761. Its appendix contained something no one had requested.

To answer the question about statistics, the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development had to list every project in which data collection played even a peripheral role. In a footnote, the ministry itself states that building statistical systems was not even the actual objective of many of these projects. What emerged, therefore, was not a list of statistics programs. It was a cross-section – a beam of light falling by chance into one corner, where projects worth roughly €9.8 billion lay exposed.

No one intended to make that figure visible. It was a by-product of a question about something else entirely. That is precisely what makes it interesting: If an incidental inquiry about statistics can reveal almost €10 billion in foreign projects, how large is the picture no one asks about?

Adding the twenty pages of the appendix line by line produces that total. Appendix 1, covering bilateral projects, comes to roughly €9.0 billion. Appendix 2, covering multilateral projects, adds more than €800 million. There are over 450 individual items, ranging from a few hundred thousand euros to sums in the hundreds of millions. They include €200,000 for a Gender Data Lab within Rwanda’s statistical agency, €68,000 for data-protection guidelines for Kenyan AI developers, and loans exceeding €200 million. In other words, this is not a sample from one particular program. It is a cross-section of almost the entire breadth of German government funding abroad – assembled without anyone intending to create such an overview.

This article is not about whether development aid is good or bad. It concerns a different question.

The Question Being Asked

May a state commit funds abroad that it does not have at home?

That is the issue at the heart of this article. Not whether any particular project is worthwhile. Not whether development cooperation is fundamentally right or wrong – that is a matter of debate, and it will not be decided here. The question is narrower and harder: May a state that generates no surplus, must take on new debt to finance its own infrastructure, and is simultaneously cutting benefits for its own citizens continue to distribute billions abroad, some of which will never return?

Anyone who wants to provide development aid must first possess the means to do so. That is not an ideological position but a matter of basic accounting. You can lend only what you have. You can give away only what is left over. Anyone who goes to the bank to borrow money and then passes it on is not giving away his own money. He is giving away borrowed money for whose repayment he remains liable.

It is the difference between someone who helps a friend in need because he can spare the money and someone who takes out a loan to do so while already knowing that he may never see the money again. The first is generous. The second acts against the interests of the people to whom he owes the borrowed money. Applied to a private household, the situation is obvious. Applied to a national budget, it is often softened by the observation that states simply operate differently. In some respects, that is true. It is not true when it comes to whether borrowed money must be repaid.

The oath of office taken by Germany’s federal chancellor and ministers is set out in Article 56 in conjunction with Article 64(2) of the Basic Law. It obliges them to devote their efforts to the well-being of the German people, increase their prosperity, and protect them from harm. The Bundestag’s Research Services have noted that this oath has no independent legal effect and carries no criminal sanction. Breaking it is therefore not a criminal offense. It remains, however, the standard that those in government set for themselves. What appears in this printed paper can be measured against that self-imposed standard.

The government does not have to spend every euro within Germany. Foreign policy can serve the country’s own interests. But anyone who tells citizens that there is no longer enough money for their schools, pensions, and bridges owes them an explanation of why enough money remains available for those same purposes abroad.

The situation at home is not an assertion but a documented reality. Across party lines, Germany’s transportation infrastructure is regarded as badly in need of repair. Dilapidated highway bridges are being closed, rail service is plagued by delays and cancellations, and mobile coverage remains patchy outside urban areas. Surveys by development banks put the investment backlog in German municipalities in the hundreds of billions. No one disputes that this backlog is real – it is the stated reason the federal government created a debt-financed special fund for infrastructure in the first place. The diagnosis is therefore uncontested. Only the consequence is disputed: If your own house suffers from a maintenance backlog that threatens its structural integrity, do you first run next door to repaint your neighbor’s apartment?

What the List Contains

The largest items on the list go to India. Three entries for climate-friendly urban mobility alone total more than €570 million. They are joined by €205 million for urban development facilities, €165 million for smart cities, and €149 million for an energy reform program. Taken together, the items for India exceed €1 billion. India operates its own space program, has landed a probe on the Moon, builds aircraft carriers, and has itself been a donor country to smaller states for years.

Another €131 million goes toward modernizing electricity distribution in Bangladesh, €58 million toward sustainable urban mobility in Peru, €80 million toward municipal environmental protection in Colombia, and €45 million – let that sink in – toward municipal financing in Tunisia.

This is where the abstract billions become concrete. Germany finances the financial resources of Tunisian municipalities while German municipalities hover on the brink of insolvency. Playgrounds in German communities go unrepaired because the treasury is empty. Take those €45 million, identify the ninety German municipalities in greatest distress, and give each of them half a million euros. The result could be ninety playgrounds, ninety renovated daycare roofs, or ninety repaired gymnasiums. Instead, the money goes to Tunis. The comparison speaks for itself. It requires no embellishment.

Not every item is a scandal in itself. The €120 million loan for Bangladesh’s power grid, for example, is a regular development loan with a twenty-five-year term and a five-year grace period – an undertaking that can be justified on its merits, even if its conditions remain open to debate. The renovation of poorly insulated, mold-infested prefabricated apartment blocks in Ulaanbaatar, where roughly one-fifth of the city’s population lives, is not inherently absurd either. The significance of the list does not lie in the proposition that every individual project is pointless. It lies in the total and in the simultaneity: Germany finances abroad the very same categories – power grids, municipal infrastructure, urban development, and residential renovation – for which the federal government must create new debt-financed special funds at home.

The federal government itself points out in the appendix that these figures represent different financial instruments. Some are grants, some are loans, and others are equity investments or guarantees. That is correct, and it matters. A loan is not money given away – provided it is repaid.

Whether it is repaid is the next question.

“But the Money Comes Back”

The most common response to any criticism of lists like this is that most of the money consists of loans, not gifts, and will therefore return. The federal government’s own figures tell a different story.

In response to another parliamentary inquiry, Bundestag Printed Paper 21/451, the federal government disclosed how much debt Germany forgave developing countries between 2000 and 2024. The total was €15.56 billion. Not deferred and not restructured, but forgiven – money that was lent and did not return.

By far the largest single item on that list is Iraq, at €4.70 billion. This is where matters become interesting, because Iraq also appears in the other printed paper covering foreign projects. It lists four new loans to Iraq totaling €455 million. The appendix describes them as untied financial loans backed by federal guarantees.

Those two terms must be considered separately. Untied means that the money is not linked to a specific purpose. The recipient may use it as it sees fit. A loan is therefore issued without determining what it will finance. That is remarkable because a donor normally seeks to achieve a particular objective with its money. Here, the absence of earmarking is explicit. Backed by federal guarantees means that the federal government guarantees the loan. If it defaults, the German taxpayer pays. The lending institution does not bear the risk; the public does.

The resulting sequence is difficult to explain. A country whose €4.7 billion debt was forgiven because it could not pay receives another €455 million – without earmarking and with a federal guarantee. A private individual acting this way would be co-signing for an insolvent debtor for the second time. Every debt counselor would advise against it. An old piece of advice has been passed down through generations: Never become a guarantor. The guarantor is the person who ultimately ends up with the noose around his neck after someone else has spent the money. That is precisely the role the federal government assumes here – not for a friend in secure financial circumstances, but for a debtor whose failure to pay is already a matter of record.

There is also a mechanism that does not appear in any of these figures but is embedded in every one of them: interest. The federal government borrows on the capital markets – the federal budget’s planned net borrowing for 2027 stands at €118.7 billion, in addition to the debt-financed special fund. It then passes this expensive money on at subsidized rates as development loans. The difference between the interest Germany pays and the interest the recipient pays is not an accounting fiction. It is a real subsidy borne by the taxpayer. Over the life of a €200 million loan, that difference can add up to tens of millions of euros in subsidies alone – disguised as a loan.

Someone with strong credit who borrows at 2 percent and lends the money to a solvent partner at 4 percent is conducting business. Someone who borrows at 4 percent and lends at 2 percent to a debtor whose repayment is uncertain is operating at a loss – with other people’s money. The second pattern, not the first, describes a growing number of these arrangements. Structuring the transaction as a loan conceals its subsidy component; it does not eliminate it.

The calculation is therefore not that Germany lends money and gets it back. In a growing number of cases, Germany borrows money in order to lend it – and does not get it back. A look ahead shows that this is not a marginal phenomenon: The federal government’s interest burden rises with every year of additional debt, and a growing share of future budgets will be tied up solely in debt service – money that will then be unavailable either for Germany’s own infrastructure or for projects abroad. Every euro borrowed and given away today narrows tomorrow’s room for maneuver.

The Case That Refutes Itself

Consider one project in detail. The list includes an allocation of €8.1 million for low-emission rice production in Thailand. Alongside it was a larger sister project, Thai Rice NAMA, with a budget of €14.9 million, financed through the Mitigation Action Facility. After completion, this larger project underwent an independent evaluation. The report is public. Read dispassionately, it is a reckoning written by the funders’ own evaluators.

The project was intended to teach rice farmers how to cultivate with lower methane emissions, primarily through alternate wetting and drying – a method in which fields are not kept permanently flooded but are allowed to dry during certain phases, reducing methane formation. Rice cultivation accounts for most of Thailand’s agricultural emissions, predominantly in the form of methane, while agriculture is the country’s second-largest emissions source after energy. The idea is therefore not unreasonable. The question is what the project actually achieved.

The official emissions target was about 93 percent achieved – narrowly missed and, at first glance, hardly a disaster. But the evaluators immediately provide the necessary context. According to their report, most of the recorded reduction resulted not from the combination of practices promoted by the project, but first from a technique that had already been common in Thailand before the project began and second from the failure of the 2019 and 2020 dry-season harvests. The evaluators describe that failure as an incidental side effect – the consequence of external circumstances, not the project. A drought reduced emissions. The project booked the success. The evaluators also note that the baselines were conservatively estimated, further improving the apparent result. Once these factors are removed, little robust evidence of the project’s claimed impact remains.

Private funding mobilized by the project, a central performance criterion, reached only about half the target. The revolving fund, intended to provide lasting financing after the project ended, had limited effectiveness according to the evaluators and failed to meet its objective. Of the roughly 210 mitigation service providers that were supposed to sustain the method after the project, only 92 materialized – less than half. The evaluators attribute this in part to delayed agreements with the participating bank and eligibility criteria that were too strict to attract enough providers. The monitoring infrastructure co-financed to measure emissions is only partly used after the project’s completion because no maintenance budget was provided. A measurement system is built, handed over, and then left to fend for itself. It is the emblem of a project that ends when the money has been spent, not when an effect has been achieved.

This was a project whose primary impact was an accidental drought, whose financing mechanism failed, and whose measurement equipment now sits underused. And the consequence of those findings? Based on the experience gathered, €40 million from the Green Climate Fund is now flowing into a successor project. The machine keeps running – not because the mixed results were overcome, but because they made no difference.

That is the decisive point, and it has nothing to do with mocking the title of a project. There is no need to ridicule low-emission rice. One need only read the evaluation report commissioned by the funders themselves. It dismantles the project more thoroughly than any polemic could.

The Pattern Behind the Individual Case

One failed project does not yet constitute a system. The question is whether Thailand is the exception or the rule. Once again, the answer comes from the responsible review bodies themselves.

The German Institute for Development Evaluation, known as DEval, examined the entire field of climate-change mitigation through development cooperation since 2002. Its central finding was that mitigation effects are not sufficiently recorded in relation to the financing targets employed. In its response to the DEval report on climate-change mitigation through development cooperation, the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development itself concedes that in many cases the effects will only be measurable in the future. In plain language: Billions have flowed into climate projects for more than twenty years, yet it is still impossible to say with any validity what they have actually achieved.

The same institute examined support for return and reintegration – the field into which the €455 million in loans to Iraq falls. The verdict recorded in the ministry’s response to the DEval report on return and reintegration was that sustainability and impact at the individual level were hardly present. The support was insufficiently tailored to the needs of returnees, in part because it simultaneously targeted the local population. Expensive, and missing the actual objective.

Then there is the most fundamental study of all: DEval’s 2022 allocation study. It asks not whether individual projects work, but where the money goes in the first place. Its findings strike at the heart of the issue. Funding is not allocated primarily according to need. It is demonstrably influenced by Germany’s external economic interests as well: Countries to which Germany exported more goods received larger commitments. Geographically closer countries did too. The evaluators describe the long-standing objective of concentrating assistance on fewer partner countries as sobering. Despite several reform efforts, it was not achieved. Germany supported sixty-nine partner countries in 2001 and still supported sixty in 2020. Repeated attempts to reduce the number petered out because each reform shrank one category only to expand the next. According to the study, the distribution follows budget lines first and partner countries only afterward. The process does not begin by asking, “Who needs it most?” It begins by allocating the instruments.

The scale behind this finding is considerable. Inflation-adjusted commitments from budget funds more than quadrupled between 2000 and 2020. In 2020, the development ministry alone was responsible for €12.43 billion, while total official development assistance exceeded €28 billion. Among the largest recipients over the period examined were Afghanistan, India, Jordan, and Ethiopia – a selection in which need, geopolitics, and national interests intermingle without need visibly determining the result.

These figures reveal the institution’s internal momentum. The budget exists, implementing organizations need projects, and the funds must be disbursed. At some point, the decisive question within the bureaucracy is no longer: Do we need this project? It becomes: Which project meets the criteria so that the budget can be spent for its designated purpose?

That raises an uncomfortable subsidiary question. If money flows to countries in which Germany has export interests, is it still development aid? Or is Germany purchasing access and goodwill and merely calling it aid? Either assistance is provided because one wants to help people there, or advantages are being acquired. Doing both at once without mislabeling the transaction is impossible. And what is the value of the advantage purchased if the money ultimately has to be written off?

The list could be continued indefinitely. Spread across more than a dozen tranches and numbered from one phase to the next are millions for a single employment facility in Africa – well over €300 million in total for a vehicle that receives another tranche year after year. Other entries do not even name a country in the partner-country column; they merely state that the projects are transregional, leaving the table itself unable to identify the specific recipient. There are also €90 million in loans to Iraq that are not included in the €455 million mentioned above but appear in an additional tranche. And there are the hundreds of millions for urban mobility in India, item after item, phase after phase. The printed paper runs to twenty pages. Every page contains figures. It is not necessary to comment on each one to recognize what they amount to in aggregate.

What the Government Is Thinking

It would be unfair to pretend that no rationale exists. There is one, and it is documented.

The development ministry explicitly no longer sees itself as a traditional donor to poor countries, but as a ministry of transformation. It seeks to drive a global transition toward climate-compatible economies, promote economic cooperation, and strengthen peace and stability. Its foundation lies in the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement. The ministry also argues that Germany, as a globally interconnected economy, depends on partnerships and access. Investments in renewable energy abroad therefore benefit Germany as well.

This is not a frivolous argument. In its strongest form, it holds that addressing the causes of displacement, conflict, and climate damage where they arise prevents more costly consequences at home. A stable partner country is a market, an ally, and a source of reduced migration pressure. From this perspective, money spent on development today is not charity but a forward-looking investment in Germany’s own security and prosperity. Those who calculate in this way consider the question of priorities to be wrongly framed: It is not a matter of domestic versus foreign spending, but of the country’s short-term versus long-term interests.

This is the logic from which the projects emerge. The calculation is not: We have €8 million left over; to whom should we give it? It is: We have committed ourselves to global goals; which projects meet the criteria? Anyone who accepts that premise will see the list not as a scandal, but as the program functioning as intended.

The problem is that this rationale does not survive the government’s own scrutiny. If this is interest-driven policy – if it is meant to pay off for Germany – then the return must be identifiable. A ministry that spends billions as an investment in Germany’s interests should be able to quantify that return. It cannot. Its own evaluations attest to missing impact measurement, failed financing mechanisms, and allocation according to budgetary logic rather than need. The rationale promises returns. The evidence shows an outflow of funds without proof of results.

An expenditure sold as an investment must be measured by the standards of an investment: How large is the return, when does it materialize, and how is it measured? The printed paper answers none of these questions, and the evaluation reports suggest that the answers are absent elsewhere as well. What is declared a forward-looking investment remains, in terms of verifiability, an expenditure without effective monitoring. And where the money demonstrably follows Germany’s export interests rather than the recipients’ needs, an uncomfortable question arises: Is this still development aid at all – or the purchase of access and goodwill under the label of assistance? This article leaves the answer to the reader. The figures themselves make the question unavoidable.

This is not an argument for abolishing development aid. Assistance abroad can be right and valuable. A country must simply be able to afford it. The first obligation of those who govern is to their own citizens. Only after that obligation has been fulfilled does room for everything else begin.

Two Classes Within the Same Budget

The budget itself shows that this room does not exist. Germany finances a growing share of its own infrastructure through new debt. The Infrastructure and Climate Neutrality Special Fund authorizes €500 billion in borrowing. Planned net federal borrowing for 2027 stands at €118.7 billion. Germany still holds top ratings from Moody’s, S&P, and Fitch with stable outlooks, but the debate over whether it can retain them is now being conducted openly. The debt ratio is 63.5 percent of gross domestic product, above the Maastricht limit of 60 percent.

Attention therefore turns to what is still being built at home. The extension of the Federal Chancellery – a project with projected total costs of up to €777 million – includes a daycare center. It will cost roughly €2.8 million and accommodate up to fifteen children. The justification for the cost is that it is located inside a high-security zone. Various claims circulating about the project – including an alleged second chancellor’s residence and its furnishing costs – do not withstand scrutiny and are omitted here. What remains documented is enough: the extension’s total cost and a daycare center for fifteen children.

Two questions are permissible here, and both are questions, not verdicts. First: Must a daycare center for fifteen children be placed inside a high-security zone, or could one be built three kilometers away for several times as many children? Invoking security is not in itself an argument. Anyone who claims special protection for his or her child beyond the standard provided by every public facility can arrange and pay for it privately. The salaries and allowances received by the decision-makers concerned make that possible.

The second question concerns demand. Fifteen places for the children of senior officials in a high-security zone – will that demand still exist in five years, or in ten? Within this particular group, the trend is more likely toward fewer children because careers and parenthood are difficult to reconcile in such positions. A daycare center is a permanent physical structure. If demand disappears, the space cannot readily be repurposed, because children from the surrounding neighborhood cannot simply be brought into a high-security zone. The result could be an expensive facility that either stands empty or operates below capacity – built for a moment, not for the long term. The same €2.8 million could build a facility three kilometers away for several times as many children, open to everyone and capable of being put to another use if necessary. That is not an accusation. It is a question of proportionality that every treasurer of a cash-strapped municipality would have to answer within his or her own budget.

Those fifteen places stand against a nationwide shortage of roughly 300,000 daycare places for children under three. One in seven children in this age group goes without. And while the government constructs, citizens face cuts. Housing benefit is scheduled to be reduced on January 01, 2027. The government’s draft suspends the adjustment due in 2027, halves the heating-cost component, and tightens the calculation formula. According to calculations by the Federal Ministry for Housing, around 400,000 households will lose eligibility altogether, while approximately 163,000 of them will fall into the basic-income support system. More than half of all households receiving housing benefit are pensioner households, and a large share of those affected include children. Once fully implemented, the state will save a net total of roughly €1.5 billion per year – approximately the same order of magnitude as the foreign projects on the other side of the ledger when spread over a few years.

Citizens face cuts. The Chancellery keeps building. Money is available for municipalities in Tunisia, but not for municipalities in Germany. Money is available to renovate residential buildings in Ulaanbaatar, while Berlin debates expropriating private housing companies because affordable housing is scarce. This is not written in a campaign leaflet. It appears line by line in the budget – in two printed papers that can be placed side by side.

The Question Remains

In the end, there is no demand, only the question with which this article began – now supported by figures.

A state borrows money to finance its own roads and schools. At the same time, it commits almost €10 billion to foreign projects whose effects its own evaluation institute describes as insufficiently documented. Over a quarter of a century, it forgave €15.6 billion in debt because the money did not return. And to the same country whose €4.7 billion debt it forgave, it extends another €455 million without earmarking and with its own guarantee.

None of this is happening during a period of abundance. It is happening while the German economy contracts for the second consecutive year, industrial corporations move production abroad, municipal treasuries are empty, and housing benefits for pensioners are being cut. A private household in this position would repair its own roof before helping a neighbor repaint his walls. Not out of callousness, but out of common sense. Anyone who allows his own house to decay will eventually be unable to help anyone.

Anyone who has sworn to increase the prosperity of the German people and protect them from harm must be able to answer this question. Not before a court – the oath carries no criminal sanction – but before those who earned the money being distributed. The issue is not whether Germany may help the world. It is whether Germany may do so with money it does not have, must borrow, and urgently needs at home.

The answer remains outstanding.

About the Author

Michael Hollister
is a geopolitical analyst and investigative journalist. He served six years in the German military, including peacekeeping deployments in the Balkans (SFOR, KFOR), followed by 14 years in IT security management. His analysis draws on primary sources to examine European militarization, Western intervention policy, and shifting power dynamics across Asia. A particular focus of his work lies in Southeast Asia, where he investigates strategic dependencies, spheres of influence, and security architectures. Hollister combines operational insider perspective with uncompromising systemic critique – beyond opinion journalism. His work appears on his bilingual website (German/English) www.michael-hollister.com and in investigative outlets across the German-speaking world and the Anglosphere.


Wars, alliances, interests and power politics – thoroughly researched and analyzed without predetermined political narratives.

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