As a journalist, a fundamental rule is to get to the point. Keep it simple. No big fancy words that go over people’s heads. As my British colleague loves to say: “If the man on the top of the bus can’t understand it, you’ve lost the reader.”
So here at Devex, we often use the term “foreign aid.” It’s what clicks for people inside and outside the development bubble. Jamie Drummond adamantly disagrees with us — preferring to call it f…ing aid (I’ll leave the dots for you to figure out).
An icon in our sector — or “industry” as some prefer to label it — Drummond was a cofounder of ONE with Bono and is the brainchild behind Sharing Strategies. He’s considered how we talk about aid a lot — in part because it can mean the difference between winning people over, or alienating them.