Safeguarding and Accountability

Learn how to prevent sexual exploitation, abuse and harassment and set up community-based complaints mechanisms to keep people safe.

What This Covers

Safeguarding is your organization's responsibility to make sure its staff, operations and programs do no harm to children and at-risk adults, and do not expose them to abuse or exploitation, including risks that come from how a program is designed. PSEAH is the sector term for protecting people from sexual exploitation, abuse and harassment by your own staff and associated personnel. This hub is for nonprofit staff who need a place to start. It also covers how to make your organization answerable to the people it serves.

Start Here

Work through these tasks in order. Each one leaves you with a document or a practice you can point to.

  • Policy and plan. Adopt a PSEAH or safeguarding policy, then write an implementation plan that lists your gaps and the actions to close them. Check progress quarterly and review the policy every two years. Start from the safeguarding policy template, and use the policy review prompt to find gaps in the one you have.
  • Code of conduct and briefing. Put a code of conduct in place and brief people on it. Signing is not enough: add a half-day PSEAH training for all staff.
  • Complaints and feedback channel. Ask communities how they already report concerns and how they would like to, then design confidential channels with them. Tell people what conduct to expect and how to complain, in line with the safe and accessible reporting the humanitarian standard requires for every group in a community. Set up a complaints and feedback mechanism walks through it.
  • Referral map. Map criminal-justice and support services before you need them.
  • Report handling. Agree who receives a report and who must not investigate. Record every report, even when there is too little to follow up. The first priority is always the survivor's safety and well-being. Investigations belong with experienced professionals trained in sensitive cases, using external help if none is available in-house. If a funder must be told, see reporting safeguarding incidents to funders.
  • Safe recruitment. Vet volunteers, contractors and incentive workers as carefully as staff, and include PSEAH clauses in contracts with partners, suppliers and contractors. In one six-month period in 2024, 32% of the known perpetrators of SEAH against aid recipients were affiliated personnel rather than direct employees. Across the 178 incidents reported in that period, volunteers accounted for 12%, contractors for 9%, partner staff for 7% and incentive workers for 4%.

Key Concepts

  • Safeguarding: doing no harm through your staff, operations and programs, above all to children and at-risk adults. Safeguarding, PSEA and protection sets out how the three terms differ.
  • PSEAH: measures that protect people from sexual exploitation, abuse and harassment by staff and associated personnel. PSEA does not name harassment.
  • Sexual exploitation and abuse: exploitation is any actual or attempted abuse of a position of vulnerability, differential power or trust for sexual purposes. Abuse is an actual or threatened physical intrusion of a sexual nature, by force or under unequal or coercive conditions.
  • Sexual harassment: a continuum of unacceptable and unwelcome behaviors of a sexual nature, toward colleagues and toward affected populations.
  • Accountability to affected people: using power responsibly, listening to communities, responding to their feedback and using complaints data to improve programs.
  • Complaints and feedback mechanism: safe, accessible ways for every group in a community to give feedback and report concerns, as the humanitarian standard requires, with reports referred on for follow-up. The inter-agency commitments also call for mechanisms to report and handle complaints of sexual exploitation and abuse.
  • Victim/survivor-centered approach: the survivor's wishes, safety and well-being come first, and consent is sought before following up.
  • Code of conduct: behavior standards that staff and volunteers must follow, and that explicitly prohibit SEAH.

Templates

The policy and code of conduct are ready to adapt: the safeguarding policy template and the code of conduct template. Build the other five as you go through the tasks above.

  • Implementation plan: gaps, actions, a quarterly progress check and a two-year policy review.
  • Code of conduct content: a ban on SEAH, mandatory reporting duties, and definitions of exploitation, abuse and harassment.
  • Report-handling protocol: trained receivers, a named senior manager, no self-investigation, confidentiality, and a record of every report.
  • Referral pathway map: authorities for criminal incidents and support services for survivors, each checked as safe, accessible and relevant.
  • Safe recruitment and vetting: at least two references, consider joining the Misconduct Disclosure Scheme, and ask all affiliated personnel to sign a declaration that they were never dismissed or sanctioned for SEAH-related misconduct.

AI for This Topic

Any draft an AI assistant gives you, whether a policy, a code of conduct or community awareness material, needs a person to read it, correct it and adapt it to your context before you use it.

One rule has no exceptions: never paste case details, survivor information or report contents into an AI assistant. SEAH case information must stay confidential and go only to the people who need it, through the reporting chain.

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