Are we using the wrong language to describe foreign aid?

Jamie Drummond hates foreign aid. That may be news to many in the development community, where Drummond is something of an icon, having co-founded ONE with rock star Bono and elevated the global visibility of issues ranging from the HIV/AIDS pandemic to debt relief in Africa. To be fair, it’s not that Drummond hates helping people around the world. It’s that he hates the term for it: “foreign aid,” which he derisively referred to as “f…ing aid.” He argued it’s centered around “foreigners,” it’s pejorative, and offers “no sense of what's in it for the giver, whether that be a reflection of their values or whether that be reflection of some other sense of a return on the investment.” During a recent Devex Pro Briefing, Drummond hammered home the point that “words matter” when it comes to convincing people to support the full range of ways that wealthier countries can lift up lower-income countries. The flip side of the coin is having people outside the development bubble tune you out, which leads to real-life repercussions. “To be a bit dramatic, I do feel that every time someone uses that phrase [foreign aid], they need to understand that they're effectively … bulldozing some clinics somewhere, or razing a school somewhere, or taking some food out of a food aid center. Because it is putting a tax on our ability to persuade people to support us,” he said. He suggested an alternative is to use more specific language, such as “lifesaving humanitarian aid.” Or if you’re discussing official development assistance, refer to it as “international public investment.” “That sounds clunky but push for it,” he said, calling “international aid” the “least bad option.” Drummond said research shows that when you ask the public about specific aid programs, support is greater than when you simply use the generic term “foreign aid.” He cited journalist Nicholas Kristof’s work as an example. “When Nick Kristof is writing another searingly brilliant piece about the impact of the cuts in The New York Times, he isn't going to a generic f…ing aid project. He's almost always been going to a specific refugee or displaced persons feeding camp in Sudan, doing a very specific thing.” So when you ask people: “Do you want to stop funding these highly effective humanitarian food aid programs, people go ‘no!’” Drummond told Devex. “When you say, ‘Do you want to support generic U.S. foreign aid programs,’ support collapses. So when The New York Times says, ‘Nick, thanks for this very searingly brilliant piece of journalism, we're going to call it Nick's latest foreign aid piece’ — boom — they've undersold the content. And they're not doing Nick a service, and they're not doing a good service to the people that Nick just visited in that feeding camp.” Drummond also doesn’t believe “development” resonates with people outside the sector. “Development means, ‘How's your personal development coming along?’ Or, ‘How's your organization's fundraising campaign coming along?’” Drummond said. “Or it's a construction development project. It's quite far down the list that an average person thinks, ‘Oh, you're talking about the international stuff.’” “I suspect ‘development’ is quite a big problem,” he added, noting that “international cooperation” is better. Nuance extends to private investment as well. For example, Drummond suggested changing “debt crisis” to “debt service crisis.” Another loaded term? “Fragile.” “I've met with some of the finance ministers and foreign ministers of countries in this situation … and they really don't like terms like fragile. They say, ‘I'm trying to raise money on the international markets. You're calling my country fragile. This does not help,’” he said. “If you say this country's in a debt crisis, how are they going to raise funds globally? How do they attract foreign investment?” Drummond also mused about what he’d call the U.S. Agency for International Development if he could rename the agency based on his own experiences talking about aid. “Ironically, when Warren Buffett advised Bono and myself on how to try and persuade America to get behind [the HIV/AIDS initiative PEPFAR], he said, ‘Don't appeal to the conscience of America. Appeal to the greatness of America.’ And I think that if you're going to try and persuade a country to participate in the world, going through its patriotism is the right and fair … way to go, so long as it leads to a place of shared values,” he said, suggesting names for USAID such as America Invests or Ameri-cares. Drummond recalled having to rethink the vernacular he used in the early 2000s when he was campaigning for multilateral debt relief and HIV/AIDS assistance — but his audience consisted of fiscal and social conservatives “who did not like the word ‘justice,’ did not like at all this phrase ‘foreign aid,’ and refused to deal with this if we conversed in that kind of language.” “And so very, very quickly, myself and Bono and the team, we stopped using those phrases. So we talked instead about measurable outcomes, the Millennium Challenge Account, the AIDS emergency with scaling up the lifesaving antiretrovirals — super specifics, outcomes-based” terminology. Drummond said that for years, the development advocacy community was disciplined in dealing with members of Congress, but then “that discipline got lost along the way.” “Perhaps in the ensuing Obama years, and in other circumstances, the discipline wasn't necessary. Then, bang, we hit 2016 and all that's happened since — and we haven't gotten back to this basic set of phrases that we need to communicate with people,” he said. “As things have gotten tougher in recent years, rather than work harder at being more persuasive with harder-to-reach audiences, our sector has retreated within itself, to more safe, technocratic spaces — supported by philanthropies, which also like these safe, technocratic spaces. Let's fund more policy reports. Let's fund more polling research data. Let's not really try and take this to the public, because let's stay within this … bubble activity,” he added. “And so we're not also trying things out in actual campaigns with the public, with difficult-to-reach segments, as much as we should.”