Germany's Development Ministry (BMZ) · Foreign Aid Spending, per Quarter (IATI) · US$ billions

## What this measures

Money Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) paid out each quarter, as it reports to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI): disbursements and expenditures, including what it spends through GIZ and KfW, converted to US dollars.

The BMZ dates its spending at the end of each quarter, so the series is quarterly. GIZ's own non-BMZ dataset carries no transactions and the Federal Foreign Office's stops in 2023, so neither is added; BMZ's data already include its spending through GIZ and KfW, so nothing is counted twice.

## Why it matters

The OECD publishes each year's official aid figures in April of the next year and its recipient tables a year after that. IATI is where publishers report spending as it happens, so it shows month by month who cut, who did not, and where the money stopped arriving, well before the OECD tables.

## How to read it

December quarters run highest. The BMZ is a little over a third of German ODA: in-donor refugee costs, the Foreign Office and other ministries are not in this series.

IATI data arrive as publishers report, and recent months fill in late. The IATI Datastore keeps no earlier versions, so Palanor measures each publisher's lag from IATI-Stats' daily record (January 2024 to October 2025) of how far its newest transaction trailed each day's read, and uses the 90th percentile, capped at 90 days: 48 days for BMZ. A month is published only once its end is that many days past and the publisher has reported it, and the six newest published months are flagged preliminary. Each point keeps the value Palanor first read and the date it read it, so later revisions can be measured.

## What it does not say

Coverage: in euros, the IATI total was €14,836 million in 2022 and €12,562 million in 2024, against the ODA the BMZ attributes to itself (€13.7 billion in 2022, about €10.8 billion in 2024 on preliminary OECD figures): 108% and 116%. IATI records cash paid, loans at full value; ODA counts a loan only for its grant element, so a ratio above 100% is expected for a ministry that lends through KfW. A month's figure is cash reported as paid out in that month, not what was budgeted or committed, and it says nothing about what the money achieved. Values are in each transaction's own currency, valued at its value date. Euro and pound values are converted at the Federal Reserve's monthly average rate for the value-date month (FRED EXUSEU, EXUSUK); a value date outside the window read, or after the latest monthly rate, takes the transaction month's or the latest rate.

## Source

IATI Datastore (api.iatistandard.org/datastore), transactions of type 3 (disbursement) and 4 (expenditure), read weekly by /api/cron/iati-spending-sync (src/lib/iati/spending.ts). BMZ publishes to IATI under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY). Data © their publishers, used under the licences in their IATI Registry entries.