Safeguarding In Crisis: When Funding Cuts Threaten Commitments

Chief Thriving Officer // KAREN ABBS

Safeguarding Consultant // RUBY MOSHENSKA

With funding cuts hitting many NGOs hard, we’ve been seeing a knock on impact on safeguarding commitments. In a recent webinar, safeguarding specialists RUBY MOSHENSKA and KAREN ABBS explored this crisis and looked at what organisations should be doing right now. Here’s some of what they shared.

Recent trends are concerning. Research by BOND has found that 45% of NGOs have reduced safeguarding budgets this year (it was 20% last year). Many organisations no longer have a full-time safeguarding post. Staff turnover has also meant a loss of institutional safeguarding knowledge.

All this leads to concerns that fewer safeguarding cases are being reported. As teams and budgets have shrunk, more is being asked of fewer people. This places significant pressure on safeguarding staff, leading to overwhelm and potential empathy fatigue. It can feel as though the needs are simply too great and there is too much to care about in already stretched systems and limited capacity.

Progress made in the NGO sector since 2018 risks being undone. After the increased focus on safeguarding systems and due diligence procedures following a widely-reported scandal in 2018, much positive change happened with comprehensive safeguarding frameworks put into place across organisations. However, it now feels like we are back to where we were ten years ago, and so we must ramp up our advocacy for safeguarding once more.

It can feel lonely to work in safeguarding at the moment. This is why peer spaces are becoming more and more important: opportunities for people to discuss safeguarding, share learning, and to lend a listening, supportive ear. We all need the chance to say ‘these are the types of issues I am seeing … what are you seeing?’.

The more stress there is in a team, the more likely there will be safeguarding issues. There are many global, interlinked stressors at the moment: geopolitical conflict, the climate crisis, funding cuts, social polarisation, and institutional fragility. This ‘polycrisis’ adds to stress in organisations, and the symptoms of that stress in turn create the conditions for safeguarding issues: exhaustion and overwhelm leading to a lack of attention put onto safeguarding, a rise in bullying and harassment, and impaired decision-making around behaviour both in the workplace and in the community.

The best place to start is to ensure your policies and standard operating procedures are strong and up-to-date. They need to be relevant to your specific place that you work. Working more closely with communities around this improves trust. And try to build up relationships with people interested in actioning robust safeguarding frameworks.

Prevention is, as ever, cheaper than response. But safeguarding researchers are still working on building compelling financial cases that demonstrate preventative measures are far more cost effective than managing responses to incidents when it comes to safeguarding. And so gather data and use it well. Compare the cost of adequate training and equipping of your people, with the cost of not getting safeguarding right (legal advice, external investigators, not to mention the reputational aspect). Use this to advocate internally and with donors too.

When funding is tight, look for the small investments that can have a big impact. This includes things like a community reporting mechanism to allow people to report concerns, feedback, or incidents in a safe, confidential, accessible way. Or it could include targeted training courses such as the ones we offer here. And it could mean reviewing and updating your policies, which clarify roles and responsibilities around case management. Use sector-wide tools and resources to do this such as those found in the Safeguarding Support Hub.

Advocate to leadership, and communicate regularly with them. Encourage leadership to prioritise safeguarding budgets even when overall cuts are required, build donor-facing narratives with the message that safeguarding is non-negotiable, tied to risk, compliance, and ethical practice and finally, continue to promote safeguarding as essential parts of risk management, and duty of care.

Support the people who hold safeguarding. They need opportunities to reflect on cases: group supervision sessions to process challenging cases can be crucial – do ask about our supervision offering here. And it’s important also to protect them from overload, provide wellbeing support, and avoid safeguarding being seen as an add-on to already busy roles such as HR and not a stand alone function.

Do you need safeguarding support? Explore how we can help you here.