Strengthening safeguarding: CHASE Africa’s commitment to protecting rural communities and staff
We have recently updated our organisational policies and procedures on safeguarding, harassment, whistleblowing and data confidentiality.
Despite the huge successes in improving access to health for rural communities through our programmes, we recognise that organisations working in local community development have the potential to do harm to the people they are serving, as well as potentially harm the project personnel.
The rural locations we work in, the level of contact we have and the type of project activities we do, can create or reinforce power imbalances and risk enabling opportunities for abuse and exploitation to occur.
As an organisation with a zero-tolerance approach to exploitation and abuse, we continually strive to strengthen our prevention, reporting and response mechanisms to reduce the likelihood and impact of any safeguarding violations. This year we commissioned a Kenyan consultant to conduct a thorough review by visiting two of our local partners.
As a result, we have now improved and tightened our own organisational policies and procedures on safeguarding, harassment, whistleblowing and data confidentiality. We believe these improvements will better prevent situations arising where abuses can happen and enable more effective and trusted reporting and response mechanisms, where community members and staff know what safeguarding is and where and how to report concerns and share feedback.
Some examples of our commitments in practice include:
Ensuring all staff, volunteers and personnel engaged with our programmes are screened, trained in safeguarding (including digital safeguarding) and agree to abide by our code of conduct.
Supporting our partner organisations to meet minimum standards in organisational commitment to safeguarding through their policy and practices, including having risk registers for CHASE Africa-funded projects which identify, assess and mitigate programmatic risks throughout the project.
Committing resources to enable our local partners to strengthen their CHASE Africa-funded programmes accordingly, such as making communities aware of what behaviour is to be expected by project personnel and having clear behaviour guidelines. For example, ensuring no project personnel spend time alone with children or vulnerable adults.
We look forward to sharing our updated safeguarding policy on our website soon. If you would like any more information in the meantime, please contact Jo McClellan at info@chaseafrica.org.uk.