Developing and modelling a positive safeguarding culture

Recent failures in safeguarding in the international development and humanitarian sector have shown that organisations cannot deliver good safeguarding practice without a healthy safeguarding culture.

This is a discussion-based tool to support leaders of organisations to understand what a positive safeguarding culture looks like. It will help leaders to assess their organisational culture in relation to safeguarding and develop clear actions to help prevent all types of harm, including sexual exploitation, abuse and sexual harassment (SEAH).

This tool is not a safeguarding training tool. Rather, it is designed to facilitate honest discussion and generate conversations to support teams or organisations to make important culture changes within their working environments.

The tool has six sections: accountability; policies and processes; do no harm/safer programming; survivor-centred approach; awareness-raising; and safer recruitment and HR processes. Each section is broken down into behaviours that support a positive safeguarding culture and includes suggested questions for discussion and actions to consider.

You can use this tool in conjunction with our guide on understanding effective safeguarding culture, which describes behaviours that are often indicative of an organisational culture that is non-compliant with good safeguarding practice.

Introduction to the tool

How to use the tool