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Humanitarian Buzzwords - a new agenda? IRIN
Humanitarian Buzzwords - a new agenda?
Words matter. In the business of saving lives, they should matter even more.

Donors, aid professionals, NGOs and diplomats will be ploughing through a pile of papers on the future of humanitarian aid this week. 

There are more than 400 submissions to the World Humanitarian Summit, most proposing ways to improve the aid system in technical or issue-specific areas, or in funding and coordination.

To navigate this trove of documents, we asked our readers and colleagues to help us come up with a list of terms that reflect the zeitgeist in humanitarian affairs, while including some painful examples of cliché, jargon and waffle. Our collection is around 100 terms – beginning with "accountability", "broker", "complementarity", and so on. They're not all bullshit, but we would say they are buzzwords.

See our full report for the complete ranking and a how-to on running any document through our buzz-o-meter.

Alternatively, you can try our Humanitarian Buzzword Bingo game, designed to keep you alert in future meetings and even (dare we say it) World Humanitarian Summit discussions. Tweet us #Bingo when you get a row.

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