“Estonia is a key partner for digitalization,” said Thorsten Schäfer-Gümbel, CEO of GIZ while visiting Estonia

A high level delegation from the German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ) visited Estonia yesterday to meet with partners and discuss future collaboration in the EU Eastern neighborhood and the African region. 

“With strong and dedicated partners like GIZ, we have achieved successful digital cooperation in the African region. Now, we hope to extend our collaboration to the eastern neighborhood countries. We appreciate the opportunity to welcome Mr Thorsten Schäfer-Gümbel, CEO of GIZ, to Estonia, to introduce our work and explore cooperation opportunities,” commented Andrea Kivi, Acting Executive Director of ESTDEV.

“Cooperating with our partners to tackle global challenges by combining mutual strengths is becoming increasingly important and a crucial part in GIZ´s new strategy,” said Thorsten Schäfer-Gümbel, CEO of GIZ. “We were very happy about the exchange with our Estonian partners, especially on digitalization, and further exploring cooperation opportunities to support Ukraine and other countries of the Eastern neighborhood. We are looking forward to strengthening our partnership, to the benefit of our partners.”

Estonia has been partnering with GIZ through multilateral initiatives and TeamEurope initiatives (TEI), mostly in Africa. Currently, the cooperation projects include human-centric digitalization in Kenya, and conducting digital maturity studies for efficient digital public service delivery in Djibouti and Somalia.  There are several regional projects in the pipeline such as “Make IT Africa”, data governance in sub-Saharan Africa,  the Africa-Europe Digital Innovation Bridge, and the E-governance and cyber security TEI.

“Estonia and Germany share a valuable partnership in development cooperation, both at the strategic and implementation level. We are working together on several initiatives in many countries, focusing on the sustainable development of our partner countries by sharing our expertise on human centric digital transformation, education, good governance, and economic development. The visit of Mr Schäfer-Gümbel provided an excellent opportunity to discuss the future of our cooperation, to continue building synergies that contribute to the resilience of our partner countries, ” commented Kairi Saar-Isop, Director-General, Director General of Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Aid, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Estonia.

During the visit to Estonia, Schäfer-Gümbel was accompanied by Eva-Maria Geiger, Portfolio Manager responsible for external relations, GIZ Ukraine, Laura Glas, Partnership Manager, GIZ Corporate Development Unit and Hannah Müller, Adviser for Sustainable Digital Development, Department Sector and Global Programmes. The delegation visited the e-Estonia Briefing Centre, exchanged with the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and met with the members of Estonian ICT Cluster such as the E-Governance Academy, Nortal and Proud Engineers.

The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH is a federal enterprise with worldwide operations. It supports the German Government in international cooperation for sustainable development.