Dirk Niebel

Dirk Niebel (born 29 March 1963) is a German politician. From 2009 to 2013, he served as Federal Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development. From 2005 to 2009, he was secretary general of the FDP.

Early life and career

Niebel was born in Hamburg on 29 March 1963. After his '' Fachhochschulreife'' (college entrance qualification) in 1983, Niebel lived for one year in a Kibbutz in Israel. Later he served for eight years as an airborne infantry noncommissioned officer in the Bundeswehr in Calw. He then studied at the German College of Public Administration in Mannheim and finished his studies in 1993 as ''Diplom-Verwaltungswirt'' (similar to a '' Master of Public Administration'' degree). In 1982, he spent a summer in the kibbutz Kfar Giladi.

From 1993 to 1998, Niebel worked at an employment bureau in Sinsheim, a part of the Federal Employment Office of Heidelberg.

Niebel is married and has three sons.

Political career

In 1977, Niebel joined the Junge Union, and in 1979, the CDU. He left both in 1981.

In 1990, he joined the FDP and was co-founder of the Heidelberg division of the Junge Liberale. Since 2003 Niebel has been a member of the Federal Board of the FDP and of the curatorship of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation. On 5 May 2005, the Federal Board elected him secretary general of the FDP with 92.4 percent of the votes.

Member of the Bundestag, 1998–2013

Niebel was first elected a member of the Bundestag in the 1998 elections. From 2002 to 2005, he was chairman of the State group of Baden-Württemberg in the parliamentary group of the FDP. From 1998, he served as speaker of the FDP parliamentary group on labor policy. In addition to this, Niebel was a member of the group of German-Israeli parliament members from 1998. At the 2009 election, he stood unsuccessfully in the single member constituency of Heidelberg, but was elected from the land list.

In the negotiations to form a coalition government of the CDU and the FDP following the 2009 federal elections, Niebel led the FDP delegation in the working group on labour and social affairs; his counterpart of the CDU was Ronald Pofalla.

From 2000 to 2010, Niebel served as the vice president of the Deutsch-Israelische Gesellschaft (German Israeli Society).

Federal Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development, 2009–2013

In 2009, Niebel was appointed Federal Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development in the second government of Chancellor Angela Merkel. His party ally Guido Westerwelle took over the office of Foreign Minister. During their time in office, German official development assistance came to 10.83 billion euros by 2013, making the country the world's third largest donor in 2012 and 2013.

When he entered office, he said the ministry is "not a world social office" (Weltsozialamt), a statement which has beenwhich has been criticized by many organizations. In his capacity as minister, Niebel served as Member of the Broadcasting Board of '' Deutsche Welle''; as Member of Board of Supervisory Directors of KfW; and as Member of the Board of Governors of the World Bank. Early in his tenure, he led efforts for a structural reform of German development assistance. By 2011, the German government established the aid agency Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), created by merging three aid organizations (German Technical Cooperation (GTZ), German Development Service (DED), and InWEnt). Also he created Engagement Global gGmbH, a state owned company, which is now responsible for founding of development aid initiatives of civil society in Germany.

In early 2012, Niebel met with Myanmar's opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and was soon among those pushing for a complete removal of sanctions against the country rather than a more gradual easing. This was meant to reward Myanmar for its rapid shift towards democracy while allowing European companies to gain a foothold ahead of their U.S. counterparts.

On 6 November 2011, Niebel inaugurated the newly established German Institute for Development Evaluation (DEval), the first body to independently evaluate the performance of German development cooperation interventions.

Under Niebel's leadership, Germany joined the United States and several other European states in late 2012 in partially suspending official development assistance to Rwanda after U.N. experts said senior Rwandan military officials had equipped, trained and directly commanded M23 rebels who briefly seized the city of Goma in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Only after negotiations with Rwandan Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo in early 2013, Niebel agreed to use the unfrozen aid for economic development and vocational training rather than direct budget support.

Also in 2012, Niebel temporarily discontinued German payments into the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM) after a corruption scandal came to light; at the time, Germany was the third largest donor to the Fund. Only in 2013, Niebel announced that Germany would contribute 1 billion euros (US$1.35 billion) to the GFATM for the period of 2012 to 2016.

In December 2012, Niebel had various development projects frozen in Egypt amid concerns about the "domestic and political developments" in the country, and fears that a "new dictatorship" was developing under Mohamed Morsi

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