The Jargon of Aid

Anyone here speak NGOish?
Africa’s newest country already knows the gobbledegook of aid
The jargon of aidJan 27th 2011 | NAIROBI | from PRINT EDITION

.THE emerging new country of South Sudan, which has voted overwhelmingly for secession from the north, has already become a leading nation of “the workshop”: not a place where hard work gets done under duress but where the language of aid is taking hold even among the natives. “I feel like a stakeholder now,” exclaimed a woman of the Dinka tribe, the region’s most prolific.

All the favourite words of NGO-speak are now aired in the makeshift corridors and canteens of Juba, the fledgling capital. Top of the list are “empowerment”, “capacity-building” and “stakeholder” (not someone actually carrying a stake). “Governance”, “civil society”, “facilitators” and “disadvantaged” follow fast behind. British NGOs have a fondness for “focal groups”. Americans like anything that leads to “inclusion”, especially of the “excluded”.

Such terms’ joy is that they are nice and woolly, hard to define and harder still to contradict: who could possibly turn down the chance to enhance development practitioners’ facilitation skills for the capacity-building of gender-disadvantaged women?