Our safeguarding commitments

As an organisation, we are committed to creating a culture and environment based on the principles of fairness, equality, respect and non-discrimination. 

We have a zero-tolerance policy on serious misconduct of any kind. Our commitment is to a transformative change in how we approach safeguarding and anti-sexual harassment, building on what process and policies we already have, but going far further than that by ensuring that the interests of beneficiaries (or ‘right holders’, a term that we prefer) and survivors are at the heart of a review of our practices and culture, especially the voices of women and girls.

ActionAid UK (AAUK) is a member of a global federation, ActionAid International (AAI). As a responsible member of the federation, we will promote a number of actions by influencing wider processes and through peer support among the members of the federation. Within ActionAid UK, we will directly implement actions that are within our remit.

Download ActionAid's safeguarding policy

Key actions we will take following the Safeguarding Summit

As part of our commitments following the safeguarding summit, these are the key actions (although not exhaustive) that we will be taking to deliver on the five commitments made at the Summit.

1.    Demonstrating accountability to beneficiaries and survivors and 4. Accountability through rigorous reporting and complaints mechanisms

We recognise that women and girls make up most of the cases, and are most vulnerable to harassment and abuse, especially due to abuse of power. We ask of all staff working with us in AAUK to take responsibility for the environment that they create, and the way in which they interact with their fellow colleagues and the people they manage, how they conduct themselves in terms of being aware of their power, privilege and position, and how they exercise this. We will tolerate no abuse of power.

ACTIONS we will take (not exhaustive) with reasons below them:

• Streamlining, simplifying and making fully accessible to all staff and associated personnel our policies, protocols and procedures regarding safeguarding (in its widest sense).
• We will undertake a mandatory review of our policies, practices and approaches to safeguarding every 6 months starting in September 2018 to ensure that these are constantly updated, refreshed as appropriate, and lessons learnt are factored into existing practices.

We will strengthen our policies and protocols related to safeguarding (including whistleblowing, complaints, anti-sexual harassment and safeguarding policies). Each policy and procedure will be simplified, accessible to all members of staff, and with a focus on being responsive to an incident and ensuring the safety of those coming forward. We will continually assess how successful these are, especially for women and girls. This will include explanations stating what they can expect from us, in what timeframes, who will be responsible for an investigation, and how feedback will be given to them. We will make this much more visible and clearer to other members of the AAI federation who receive funding from AAUK, to ensure greater awareness, and support them in developing similar approaches, whilst also encouraging them to do likewise with local organisations with whom their have partnership arrangements.

• ACTION: Include safe and independent spaces for women and girls to disclose and hold us accountable for our behaviour within all programmes we design and/or fund, and continually assess how effective they are in terms of women and girls feeling confident and be able to disclose.

We will strengthen our accountability and reporting mechanisms within programme design ensuring best practice, and context appropriate systems. We will ensure that within every programme we are involved in designing and/or funding, that there is always a space for people to go that has independence from the management structure, and where they can hold us to account. In the past we have been able to include safeguarding within funding proposals and to enable us to provide these spaces, we will seek to do this moving forward.

• ACTION: Continue to make mandatory the signing of a conduct agreement when overseas to reinforce that no-one should have unsupervised access to people we are working with, especially women and girls.

Currently all ActionAid countries involved in child sponsorship activities must adhere to strict ActionAid International (AAI) protocols that are designed to minimise risks to children. As a Federation we will review these protocols to ensure that they are as robust as possible and that expectations are explicit, signed up to, and monitored. All stakeholders visiting programmes (including donors, supporters, journalists, consultants, trustees and anyone else there on behalf of, or in association with, ActionAid) already sign a conduct agreement before travelling, and we will continue, as part of this, to demand that no-one be allowed unsupervised access to any beneficiaries of assistance.

ACTIONS:

• Embed AAUK new images policy to protect child survivors of sexual violence, including content gathering and content storage;
• Train staff in responsible and sensitive content gathering.

As part of our ongoing commitment to protect and support children and vulnerable people, we will build on both AAI and AAUK’s existing policies and protocols regarding the gathering and usage of stories, images and video of our beneficiaries. In recent years AAUK and AAI content has been gathered with strict levels of informed consent, which has included concealing the faces and full names of children when requested by parents, guardians or the children themselves, removing the surnames of all children and their parents, removing the locations, identifying landmarks and photo metadata of all children. Our new AAUK images policy, launched this year, will build on and further strengthen this commitment, to ensure that any images or videos of child survivors of sexual violence are gathered, used and stored in such a way that none of their faces are revealed. And we have already begun a retrospective project to remove such images from AAUK’s website by June 2018. To embed the policy, ActionAid UK will invest in training to conduct responsible and sensitive content gathering and ensure that all content is monitored and therefore compliant before it becomes accessible to others (on our website or internal channels).

ACTIONS:

• Annual attestations from countries regarding compliance to Federation policies;
• Internal audit plan from the Federation to focus on auditing compliance;
• If AAUK are not assured after internal Federation channels are exhausted then AAUK will explore own measures, including withdrawing resources/funds in most serious cases.

AAUK will ensure that all parts of the Federation that we work with via memorandum of understanding (MOUs) continue to include adherence to all of our Federation policies aimed at safeguarding beneficiaries and survivors, including (although not exhaustive) anti-terrorism, modern slavery, child protection, and anti-sexual harassment. We will ask that countries sign annual attestations that they both comply with the policies and that they have mechanisms in place to ensure that all local partners also comply. Auditing adherence to policies is a critical part of any internal audit plan of the country by our internal Federation audit team. If AAUK is not assured after internal Federation channels have been exhausted, then we will explore our own measures, including whether to withdraw resources on grounds of non-compliance.

• ACTION: Consortia memorandum of understanding to include policy and procedure assessment around safeguarding and anti-sexual harassment, decisions made as a result regarding AAUK participation in the consortia.

As part of the due diligence phase of working in consortia, we will assess all partners' policies and procedures, and then make the decision whether we can either support the partner/s to be able to adhere to and implement the policies and procedures or whether we walk away. We will be explicit in our programme design regarding the fact that funding is conditional on the partner/s being able to evidence compliance with the full range of policies, and that we expect them to pass those conditions on to all partners in the MOUs they sign. AAUK will ensure that any consortium MOU also includes these provisions, ensuring that partner MOUs explicitly mention adherence to policies including safeguarding and anti-sexual harassment, and adherence to our code of conduct.

• ACTION: We will act on any recommendations for improving accountability in our forthcoming external assessment of our commitments to the Core Humanitarian Standards (CHS), implementing those under our direct control and promoting improvements at country or federation level using our leverage and funding mechanisms.