Anyone who’s just entered the international development industry has probably struggled with the jargon, from sectorwide acronyms to unique terms used by aid officials and development professionals at certain institutions.
Former U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres mentioned this during his own session at the U.N. informal dialogues last week, noting that he tries to avoid using acronyms whenever he speaks — as not everyone will be familiar, for example, with the term IDP, or an internally displaced person.
Even so, the three-day public interviews were peppered with development-speak, as well as articles and resolutions unfamiliar to even a seasoned aid worker.
Devex collected some of the potentially alien language used during the dialogues and broke the terms down for your future reference.
