Jargon: Burn Rate
Meaning: How much a development project spends each month, or each year. You need to keep an eye on your burn rate to make sure that you’re not going to be overspent by the end of your project or not spend all your money and have to give it back to the donor (and do less work than you could have.)
Jargon of the Day: Monetization
Meaning: Monetization means something slightly different in a humanitarian and development context than it does in social media. In this case, it means selling food aid commodities in order to take the money and fund non-food projects. Many, perhaps most, food aid projects are actually monetization projects. It’s often the most useful thing to do with donated rice or flour.
I hate this word because it keeps you from thinking about what a convoluted process selling commodities actually is. It’s a tidy, professional-sounding word that covers up the fact that we are taking American-grown commodities, selling them in foreign countries, and then using the money for projects. Perhaps we should just donate money in the first place?
Jargon: NFIs
Translation: NFIs stands for Non-Food Items. This is a package of household items such as blankets, utensils, and cooking pots given to refugees or internally displaced persons to help them survive in their new location. You can find the term in jargony, jargony action here. You can find a definition and discussion here.
Jargon: Incentivize
Translation: Give someone a reason to do something, or to make people believe that effort will lead to some form of success. I really hate this word. I find it exceptionally meaningless and redundant.
Jargon: Leverage
Translation: Officially, it means to use one kind of funding as a way to inspire other donors. So you could leverage a $500 donation by getting a foundation to match it, and have $1000. In practice, though, it just means to use multiple funding streams to fund one project, whether or not the later funds were donated because of the first ones. NGOs claim all the time that they are leveraging your donation when what they really mean is “combining with other kinds of money.”
Jargon: Transshipment
Meaning: To ship to an intermediate point, and then on to a final destination. Always used when talking about smuggling.
Jargon: Ground-truth
Meaning: What’s really happening in-country. Often used as a verb: “We need to ground-truth this before we move forward on it.”