It’s what you say, not just how you say it

What do they call it?

I work at BRAC Centre, 75 Mohakhali Ave.  Every morning when I hail a rickshaw, I say, “How much to go to TB gate?”  The office is next to the Chest Disease and Lung Hospital, hence “TB (Tuberculosis) gate.”  If I said “BRAC Centre” or “75 Mohakhali Ave,” who knows where they would take me—likely for a long ride that ended will an expectation for a nice, big payment.  Maybe BRAC University or BRAC bank, if I’m lucky.  But “TB gate” works any time, except on the rare day when I get a rickshaw driver on his first day in Dhaka.

There’s a whole informal language of landmarks in Dhaka. Some of them are still there, but others are remnants of names long gone.  To the rickshaw drivers, the International Centre for Diarrheal Disease is the “Cholera Hospital,” as it was called decades ago.

All of this makes it difficult to navigate the city when you’re new.  Often it’s not enough to know the building name, address and road number.  To understand directions, you really need to know the mosques, the homes of famous people, political buildings, fields, and markets.  The knowledge also marks you as an insider.  When negotiating the fare for the ride, I expect a lower price when I ask to go to “Huzurer bari” (literally “the muslim scholar’s house”) than when I say “the Oxfam office on Road 3, Banani”, even if they at the same place.  It’s not just the language, it’s also the clear signaling about my intimacy with Dhaka. They know that I am not messing around.

Public and private organizations alike have to think about the signaling of their products and the insider language of those that they are targeting.  In development, there is an unfortunate tendency to import language, acronyms, and concepts without adapting them to the local vernacular.  Sometimes it works—“sms” (i.e. text message) and “missed call” are now Bangla words for all intents and purposes.

But can one really expect a villager with low literacy in her own language to grasp vocabulary and concepts like “MDG” (Millennium Development Goals)?  NGO (non-governmental organization)?  This is a lazy tactic; to simply transplant English acronyms to places where the work actually takes place, to make it approachable to the people whose lives are most affected. 

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about mobile money and the opportunities to increase adoption, in ways that helps low-income households.  One of the concepts that is particularly difficult is the “PIN” (personal identification number).   Many mobile money users in Bangladesh do not have bank accounts.  This is the first time that they’ve had a code that they need to keep to themselves.  Older adults often don’t know their exact birthday (or their children’s birthdays), so the easy 4-digit combinations that one might suggest are harder to come by.

Another problem is that customers don’t understand that they can’t share the pin number.  When they go to a busy market and ask a mobile money agent to help them transfer money, they’ll hand him the phone and just tell him the PIN, in front of everyone.  Last week I visited a community in Northern Bangladesh where several women were using mobile money, and when I asked if they always remembered their PIN, they all just blurted it out in front of all their neighbors!  I was the only one cringing. So there is a huge need for consumer awareness campaigns.

I noticed that some of our staff said “gopon number” (secret number) instead of PIN. For most of our clients, this is a much more intuitive concept—it implies that it’s something important and shouldn’t be shared freely.  It may not solve the problem of helping customers commit it to memory, but certainly it’s a step in the right direction.

Another major issue is the “KYC” (Know Your Customer) form that’s required to open a mobile money “wallet.”  The form requires many personal details (a simplified version of a form anyone opening a bank account would typically complete).  If the form is improperly filled out, then the customer’s account is deactivated.  While traveling, I heard that this was a common occurrence.  I couldn’t help but wonder whether coming up with a localized name for the form could help—“KYC” just sounds like a fried chicken chain to me!

The words obviously have impact on comprehension, but they also signal about the initiative’s origin, approachability, and attention to customer needs.  Words are cheap, and spending some time thinking about how to translate concepts so that they are grounded in everyday experiences and fit the context certainly can have big pay-off.  Don’t settle for 75 Mohakhali Ave.  Figure out the “TB gate” equivalent and make it easy.