developmentspeak

I’ve now been a development industry flunky long enough to pick up some of the vocabulary. In case you find yourself cornered at a cocktail party by someone like me who wants to impress you with the work they’re doing overseas, here’s a guide to help you understand what they’re really saying.

Sustainability. Most everyone will tell you that they only do sustainable projects, meaning that when they leave everything will keep on working. Sounds great doesn’t it? But let's dissect this one for a second. Doing anything takes 1) motivated, skilled people and 2) money. Take those away and you have no project, no business, no government. It took me a while to figure out that when someone tells you their project is sustainable what they really mean is “I’m only committed for another 2 years, then I hope somebody else takes over.”

Capacity. Developmentspeak for ability, as in, “the government does not have the capacity to do take our money without 25% of it landing in Swiss accounts.” Ability would make sense to normal people so we use capacity to sound smart.

Capacity Building. Also known as enabling. Every grant request says they’re doing capacity building, usually for the government. Perhaps this is why so much of the money in development goes into conferences. The truth is you build “capacity” by hiring good people, not by sending lazy people to a 3-day conference.

Monitoring and Evaluation. This means counting things. Like how many people you help or how many people answer a survey a certain way. Believe it or not, this is a hot new area in development and goes by the hip acronym M&E.

Pilot Project. This means either 1) you don’t have enough money for your project or 2) what you plan to do is explicitly against the policy of the country in which you are working. So you do a pilot, with 50 farmers instead of millions, just to see if it works. Most development projects are pilots – but when do we follow them up with, uh, projects?

Technical Assistance. Technical means stuff that you have to have been trained to do. So development people (like me) justify our salaries by saying we provide technical assistance where the government does not have capacity. The result is a country run by short-term consultants. It’s crazy to imagine any organization run this way, but somehow it seems like a good idea in development.

Now Let's Practice:

Cocktail Party Schmoozer: I am performing Monitoring and Evaluation technical assistance for a grass-roots NGO project.
(Translation: I count things for a small non-profit.)

CPS: We have ensured our pilot project will be 100% sustainable by enabling local partners.
(Translation: We are delusional enough to think our under-funded 2-year project will continue without us.)

CPS: Due to a lack of capacity in the health system we are focused on technical assistance as a short-term solution and capacity building for long-term viability.
(Translation: Right now we do the work, but we think after a couple of conferences at expensive hotels local doctors will be doing heart surgery no problem.)