Building Safer Organizations
Preventing and responding to sexual exploitation and abuse
One of the most serious complaints to an organisation is that a staff member has abused or exploited a beneficiary. Since 2004, Building Safer Organizations has been helping organization apply principles of good complaints handling to cases of sexual exploitation and abuse by staff. BSO helps NGOs achieve greater accountability by:
- training NGO staff through the BSO Investigations Learning Programme (LP) on conducting fair, thorough and confidential investigations into complaints of sexual exploitation and abuse of affected populations;
- promoting implementation of common standards on preventing and responding to sexual exploitation and abuse;
- publishing Guidelines on complaints mechanisms and investigation procedures, a training Handbook containing the Investigations Learning Programmes and the Investigator Newsletter;
- opportunities for peer to peer engagement through international and regional networks;
- support to develop better practices through research and advocacy.
"To my mind the stand out success of the Lanka Tsunami program was "Accountability". It was obvious from the quantitative and qualitative evaluation data that the ops teams learned from, and worked hard to, include accountability standards into each implementation stage resulted in far greater community satisfaction and ownership with outputs. It was great to see happy stakeholders with realistic expectations being met rather than just people who woke up one day with a house, latrine or well (somewhat begrudgingly in some cases)."
Andrew Lanyon, Operations Director (Program Implementation) Lanka Tsunami Response Team, World Vision International
