Some of those of us who are old enough to remember Jim Grant’s enthusiasm for GOBI and GOBI-FFF, EPI, UCI and more, were a bit troubled about one of the ‘Fs’ in GOBI-FFF. It was about Family Spacing which he linked to child survival. Others were not entirely persuaded by this logic because UNFPA was said to be the lead agency in such matters.
Actually, it is not about child survival that I write, it’s about the acronyms which accompany UNICEF’s handling of programmes and reporting on them.
When first I joined the organisation, I felt considerably challenged at having to know and use so many acronyms that I seemed to forget them as fast as I had to learn new ones. It crossed my mind that acronymania seemed to behave much as population does – namely, it breeds faster than it dies. Should UNICEF not now have a standard appendix to their Annual Reports, listing all the existing and recently adopted acronyms ? And would the acronym fertility index exceed that of the population on which the report is being written ? Food for thought, indeed.
To be fair, UNICEF has indeed written about acronyms and a quick visit to this UNICEF website indicates that – at the time of writing – there were some 737 acronyms current: https://open.unicef.org/unicef-acronyms. Check it out if you don’t believe it.
The real question perhaps should be how to control the acronym family’s inclination to keep expanding ? Maybe, PlayPumps – which advertised on some of their overhead tanks – might have suggested that South African Airways had the answer.
There was some interest generated because of this advertisement because, apparently, the major donor to PlayPumps had a foreign policy which forbade the use of condoms in favour of natural methods (ie sexual abstention). Shortly after this appeared on the internet, the photograph was ‘pulled’, making us wonder if the advert itself on overhead tanks, was overpainted ? Whatever the case, the acronyms continued to proliferate. . . . .
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As a retiree, I have given up on family planning
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