Saturday 23 October 2010

Development speak in many tongues - look it up here

Yesterday in Bujumbura, friends described to me how they had managed to reduce the incidence of particularly violent forms of forced marriage involving abduction and gang rape in their home region, up in the High Plateaux of Southern South Kivu (DRC). It was extremely enlightening, but also sort of surreal because of their generous use of development jargon. Terms such as "baseline assessment", "participatory survey", "target groups", "sensitisation" and "awareness-raising" punctuated every sentence, hiding to some extent what really happened.