Background
Aid, also known as the voluntary transfer of resources from a donor to a recipient, has been a major focus of international relations over the past half century (Ovaska 2003, Mosse & Lewis 2005).Whether in the context of development assistance, which focuses on aid provided by governments and other agencies to support the economic, environmental, social and political development of developing countries, or in the context of humanitarian aid, which focuses on short-term logistical assistance to people in need of help, developed countries have transferred large amounts of resources bilaterally, multilaterally, formally and informally to Southern countries to support their development prospects (Economides et al. 2008). Among the largest contributors of ODA (official development assistance) in the world, Germany has always been in the lead. In 2020, for example, the United States led with about US$35 billion, followed by Germany with US$28.4 billion (Ilasco 2020).
With such an effort by developed countries to address poverty and humanitarian challenges in fragile countries, sustainable growth or change in these countries should have been evident. However, since the emergence of the North-South aid dynamic, several experts and observers have increasingly criticised that this aid is "dead" (Moyo 2008) or that it does not correspond to the needs of the recipient countries (Nago & Krott 2020, Nago 2021).
In the particular case of the cooperation between Germany and Cameroon (about 134 years old, from the period when Cameroon was under German protectorate until today), which is the main focus of Germany's effective international aid (GEFINAID), it is observed that Germany has been the provider of the largest bilateral governmental development aid for decades. In 2017-2019, for example, Germany provided more than €100 million in aid to Cameroon (Federal Foreign Office 2020). One might have expected that the living conditions of Cameroonians would have improved considerably with such large amounts of aid.Paradoxically, the opposite is true. Cameroon is among the group of countries where both poverty and the number of poor people have increased the most in the world over the past decades. Moreover, in Cameroon, a little-publicised but very devastating humanitarian crisis is underway. A civil war of secession is raging in the southwest and northwest regions of Cameroon, where armed groups have killed more than 5,000 civilians and displaced more than half a million people. In the northern regions of Cameroon, the Islamist armed group Boko Haram has carried many attacks in the Far North region since January 2019, killing thousands civilians. The conflict between government forces and Boko Haram has killed thousands of Cameroonians and displaced over 270,000 people since 2014. Supporting Cameroon is to move out of these crisis and foster sustainably its development is therefore definitely an emergency. Thus its choice as the starting point of GEFINAID´s mission to support African countries in fostering their development prospects.