State chancellery of Thuringia

Development cooperation is a key task of international politics. Even if the competencies for development cooperation basically lie within the Federal Government, the Free State of Thuringia aims to provide its own case-by-case or project-based contribution to this field area and to cooperate with the Federal Government.

In the Guidelines for Development Cooperation (Leitlinien der Thü-ringer Entwicklungszusammenarbeit) adopted on January 2nd 1996, the Free State of Thuringia acknowledged its responsibility for deve-lopment policy. Accordingly, the aim of the Free State of Thuringia has always been the improvement of living conditions of individuals through development cooperation. True to the principle of self-help, over the last twenty years numerous measures of vocational training of professionals in Thuringia or in their home countries as well as corresponding projects have been promoted. The collaboration with the Kingdom of Cambodia in the field of environment has been the focus of international cooperation for many years.

The Thuringian State Government sees development cooperation as a cross-cutting area and thus supports initiatives and projects of the development policy network in Thuringia. The One World Network Thuringia (Eine Welt Netzwerk Thüringen), as an umbrella organi-zation of the development policy commitment of Thuringian NGOs, is the most important cooperation partner of the Thuringian State Government. Furthermore, the Free State of Thuringia welcomes the work of social groups, churches and other non-governmental actors of development cooperation and supports them through mutual in-formation and experience exchange in their self-responsible action.

The main focus of Thuringia’s development policy is sustainable education. Since 1995, it has been supporting the “Thuringia days of educational and information in the field of development (Thüringer Entwicklungspolitischen Bildungs- und Informationstage – THEBIT) aimed at familiarising pupils of Thuringia with the problems of de-veloping countries and, consequently, at contributing to dismantling xenophobia and the promotion of tolerance.

Against the backdrop of the „Development Year 2015“ with nu-merous international decisions, whose implementation lay in the responsibility of each individual, another focus of Thuringia’s govern-ment will be addressing how the worldwide Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can be successfully implemented. The starting point for the discussion process on this issue is going to be the FutureTour (ZukunftsTour) of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development with its stop in Thuringia in February 2016.