Diakonie Katastrophenhilfe

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Diakonie Katastrophenhilfe is the humanitarian relief agency of the Protestant regional and free churches in Germany, founded in 1954 and based in Berlin. It works with local and national partner organizations in around forty countries, responding to wars, displacement, droughts, earthquakes, storms, floods and epidemics.

The agency is part of the Evangelisches Werk fur Diakonie und Entwicklung, sharing its umbrella with the development agency Brot fur die Welt and the domestic social welfare organization Diakonie Deutschland. It is also a member of the worldwide church humanitarian network ACT Alliance, placing its work within a global network of church-affiliated relief agencies rather than operating alone.

Seven decades after its founding, Diakonie Katastrophenhilfe continues that mission today, active wherever the Protestant churches in Germany direct emergency relief, from acute disaster response to the longer recovery work that follows it, still organized under the same Evangelisches Werk umbrella it has held since its founding. Its own annual report each year states that its figures are drawn from the audited statements of its parent legal entities rather than from a standalone audit of the relief agency itself, a distinction the agency states plainly rather than leaving implicit.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Diakonie Katastrophenhilfe's own annual report for 2024 records total income of 68,598,429.64 euros against total expenditure of 88,572,300.29 euros, a year in which the agency spent roughly twenty million euros more than it took in. Of that expenditure, 79,738,670.01 euros, about 90 percent, went directly to programme work rather than administration.

The report's own finance section states plainly that its figures are drawn from the independently audited financial statements of its parent legal entities, the Evangelisches Werk fur Diakonie und Entwicklung and the Evangelische Zentralstelle fur globale Entwicklung, rather than from a standalone audit of Diakonie Katastrophenhilfe itself. The parent entities' own auditor confirmation notes are published separately once each audit concludes.

A year of spending outpacing income is not unusual for a disaster relief agency, whose expenditure follows need rather than a fixed budget; the gap reflects the scale of the emergencies the agency responded to across its roughly forty partner countries during the 2024 financial year, funded in part by reserves the report does not itself itemise line by line.