How many more years before we walk the talk? Translating safeguarding and localisation into action in DRC

In the wake of the Ebola crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), revelations came to light of significant levels of sexual exploitation, harassment and abuse of community members by individuals involved in the crisis response. Perpetrators included local community leaders, and staff of national, local and international organisations, including the World Health Organization. A senior protection from sexual exploitation and abuse (PSEA) technical support mission was deployed to the country, visiting Goma, Beni and Butembo, Bunia, Mbandaka and Kinshasa, and issued a report, which stated:

While the risk of SEA in DRC is a long-standing issue, the public health response to the 10th Ebola outbreak in eastern DRC created the conditions for exacerbated SEAH risk. The overall response was characterized by a large influx of cash, [and] a disproportionately male workforce made up of people coming from outside the local community.

It is notable that the mission did not take the opportunity to hear from eyewitnesses, survivors and those providing survivor support in the areas where abuse is happening in South Kivu province.

Since that visit and the coverage of those abuses, there has been a considerable scale-up in efforts to prevent and respond to PSEA in DRC, significantly driven by the wider momentum on these issues as the global humanitarian sector has sought to belatedly give safeguarding the attention and resourcing it deserves. For example, a UN agency key informant described how UNFPA has developed partnerships with four national NGOs to expand PSEAH outreach in territories and locations where INGOs and UN agencies do not have access. The national NGOs collect information and share this with their INGO partners. The UN synthesises and manages this information to then follow-up through advocacy and other actions.

To capture the perspectives of national and local NGOs involved in humanitarian action and wider development and women’s rights efforts, we interviewed staff from 26 national NGOs, five INGOs and two UN agencies (UNFPA and UNICEF). The national NGOs that we spoke with included a mix of seven women-led organisations and women’s rights activists , and 19 national NGOs focused on humanitarian or development and humanitarian mandates, which were generally all male-led. In addition, there was a mix of both local NGOs that had benefitted from funding, capacity-strengthening and other forms of support on safeguarding and/or PSEAH (6 organisations), and those that had not received any to date (20 organisations). As one of our co-authors manages a shelter for survivors of gender-based violence (GBV) and is connected to networks of women employed in national humanitarian organisations, she was able to draw on insights shared by women about their own experiences of SEAH: both community members that had experienced SEAH as project participants, and women that had experienced SEAH as employees of institutions involved in the aid response.

Based on these interviews and additional literature research, our findings point to the following seven priorities to help more effectively engage, support and capitalise on the potential role of national and local NGOs in PSEAH and safeguarding efforts in DRC:

Shift expectations on PSEAH beyond the tick box

One of the most consistent and concerning issues raised by our interviews was the inevitable gap between organisations establishing a policy on PSEAH and then institutionalising and socialising that policy into their systems, operations and staff understanding and practices at all levels. In several cases, we heard from senior managers or technical specialists mandated to lead on PSEAH – both amongst INGO and national NGO informants – that their agency had established policies and conducted trainings with NGO partners. Yet follow-up interviews with those NGOs’ staff revealed that most were unaware of the policy, or if they were, they did not have the knowledge to implement it in practice and highlighted that project participants and wider community members would have no idea about either the agency’s safeguarding policy or how to raise a complaint or concern if need be.

One larger national NGO had received several rounds of training on PSEA from at least three different donors, yet of the four staff we interviewed in their Bukavu office, only two of these had ever heard of PSEAH, and one of these had heard about it from other sources, not from training or other efforts within their organisation. They also expressed the view that the PSEAH system in their organisation was nominally in place, but in reality it was not functional. Another local organisation told us that in order to access funding, they agreed to have PSEAH documents as outlined by their donor agency, but they had never received any follow-up training or other support to implement them. Building PSEAH into proposals and adding a requirement to have an implementation plan that is regularly monitored would help address this issue. Several heads of organisations presented us with tools that had been provided to them on PSEAH, but were not able to describe their contents when questioned during the interview. Therefore, involving communities, community-based organisations and national NGOs earlier in safeguarding processes would result in a better understanding of SEAH risks, and increase the relevance and effectiveness of any interventions.

An issue raised by several interviewees was the extent to which top-down requirements from institutional donors and international agencies is driving the momentum to establish policies, training and strengthened practices on safeguarding, as well as resourcing. For example, UNICEF has established six norms of relevance to PSEA, which organisations must meet and against which they are evaluated prior to contracting with their NGO partners. The Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD) has rolled out a global process to collaborate with partners on assessments of the partners’ strengths, challenges and priorities to address safety, accessibility, dignity, inclusion and accountability priorities (so-called ‘SADI’ profiles); these result in the development of short- and longer-term action plans to address priority gaps and challenges. CAFOD provides ongoing accompaniment to assist partners to achieve the priority actions set out, which may include funding specific capacity-strengthening initiatives.

This raises questions: how can donor funding and partnerships between international agencies and national and local NGOs more effectively support such efforts, and ensure that they go further than the ‘tick box’ of having policies in place to access funding or secure a partnership agreement with an international agency? The goal is a more sustained and meaningful approach to preventing and responding to SEA, one that is tailored to their local context.

Provide sustained, regular training and sensitisation of staff and contractors (and all involved)

The majority of the INGO and national and local NGO staff that we interviewed had limited knowledge of the safeguards within their own agencies’ manual of procedures and code of conduct (when they had these in place). Key factors cited for this were the lack of continuous training, and the internal culture and commitment needed to cascade information and training about these safeguards to their different sub-offices. To the extent that any agencies had engaged on any efforts regarding PSEAH, this had been mainly limited to a small circle of staff, and it was yet to be cascaded to a wider range of staff, or consultants and suppliers. For example, of the 33 organisations interviewed, only three of these had the safeguards signed by staff when they started working for the agency. It was even written in one organisation’s manual that in emergencies, exceptional arrangements could be made for newly hired staff to start work without any PSEAH briefing.

A major factor raised by national and local NGOs – both those that had received support until now and those that had not – was the need for longer-term funding and partnerships to more effectively institutionalise, disseminate and practise PSEAH commitments. The challenges faced by local NGOs in addressing safeguarding are financial, technical and organisational. Most national and local NGOs are receiving very short-term grants, generally between 6–12 months. If effectively addressing SEAH involves addressing the attitudes, norms and practices of individuals, teams and organisations, multi-year timeframes for investment and organisational change are required; yet funding for work over five- or 10-year horizons is almost non-existent for national organisations in DRC. More than one key informant talked about the need for ‘continuous capacity-building’ on PSEAH, and that short-term, fragmented, ineffective approaches to PSEAH were shaped also by a wider challenge in short-term, fragmented, ineffective partnerships between humanitarian agencies, in particular between international agencies and national and local NGOs.

There is a perception that the significant funds mobilised for PSEAH at the global level have been largely captured by international agencies and consultants and that these resources are not cascaded in an equitable or effective manner to national and local NGOs. As a consequence, national and local NGOs are at the frontline of humanitarian response, with ever-expanding expectations of what they are supposed to deliver on PSEAH alongside other programmatic outcomes, but the resources allocated to them are not commensurate with the tasks expected of them. Indeed, as staff of national NGOs acquire expertise on PSEAH or other issues, they are then also poached by international agencies, further undermining the investment in local capacity.

Cascade coordination and joint effort to the local level

As with other agendas where there is a gap between policy and practice, interviewees highlighted how decision-making and attention to PSEAH has been initiated at headquarters in the capital and in provincial centres: there needs to be a shift to focus on action across DRC in the places that humanitarian action is delivered to communities. The overall picture emerging from our interviews is one of PSEAH policies having been adopted at headquarter level and involving a small circle of national and local organisations, but inadequately disseminated, understood or acted on at the sub-national level, and yet to reach the vast majority of national and local NGOs involved in humanitarian response. Although just over half of the national organisations interviewed had heard of the existence of an inter-agency network on PSEAH, the majority of them were not informed about what it was doing and had not yet been engaged by it.

Since December 2020, a PSEAH coordination structure had been established in DRC, and the first official PSEAH working group meeting took place around June 2021. Prior to this, PSEAH efforts have been taken forward through individual agencies. For example, UNICEF has worked both through INGOs such as War Child and a number of national NGOs, such as TPO, ACAD, AVREO and APES. These national NGOs in turn collaborate with community-based organisations that establish various initiatives, such as complaints boxes in health structures, early-warning community mechanisms, alert delivery channels and information management systems.

In Mutala and Bunyakiri, SEA survivors are given support at a Protestant hospital, which is supplied with post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) kits for HIV treatment and has received other training. The government’s provincial department for gender is reportedly also engaged in a mechanism to support on access to justice for GBV survivors. Additionally, UNFPA described a network of more than 30 international and national organisations engaging in inter-agency PSEAH efforts. This includes national organisations such as SARCAF, a women’s organisation; TPO, an organisation providing psychosocial support; IDHE, a women’s rights organisation; and ADMR, a human rights organisation, specialising in access to justice. These examples demonstrate the value in having networks inclusive of organisations at all levels to turn policy into practice.

Several local NGOs expressed a cynicism about international humanitarian coordination processes, which they perceived as a largely extractive experience. They provide input to assessments or other agendas of the coordination process, but do not feel that they receive tangible benefits from it. Whilst a more effective humanitarian response, and indeed more effective SEAH prevention and response, should be seen as a benefit for all actors – including local NGOs – the fact is that coordination also links to resource mobilisation and, until now, some in local NGOs perceive that they input to coordination processes that secure funding for the international partners, rather than themselves. Proper communication and coordination on PSEAH between donors and funding partners (UN, INGOs) and those downstream (national NGOs, community-based organisations) would greatly increase trust and promote transparency amongst staff and communities.

Address the social and cultural factors that shape understanding of PSEAH

The majority of interviewees suggested that the most common form of SEAH was sexual harassment, including sexual harassment of women employed within humanitarian agencies, and the sexual exploitation of women community members by employees of organisations involved in aid efforts. Interviewees also suggested that a majority of SEAH complaints received relate to sexual exploitation by government officials involved in decision making or overseeing humanitarian aid efforts at different levels.

A major factor undermining efforts to address these by national and local NGOs, and by international agencies working in partnership with those NGOs, is the extent to which women and men think it is normal for men to offer to employ a woman in exchange for sex and to make sexual advances to a woman in the workplace. One Congolese women’s rights activist described a widespread belief that ‘by nature men are sexually weak compared to women’ and that people will assume and insinuate that the woman herself provoked the harassment. Whilst some interviewees suggested that local social and cultural norms are helpful in PSEAH, as such abuses are prohibited and taboo, others highlighted that it is precisely the taboo nature of SEAH that results in victims themselves, their families and community leaders preferring to not discuss or address it. Discriminatory gender norms and the stigma that survivors of any gender-based violence (including SEAH perpetrated by those involved in humanitarian responses) face are major barriers to action within national and local NGOs, and discourage any survivors of such abuses to seek assistance. An additional factor is that when family cohesion is at stake, people choose to keep quiet.

Several organisations also emphasised how important the respect of local norms, traditions and customs is in their ability to operate in the community. This represents a barrier to them engaging with community stakeholders – whether project participants or community leaders – in discussing or identifying strategies to mitigate harmful norms and practices in relation to gender, including the prevention of and response to SEAH. As one chairman of a national NGO told us:

I hear about these issues [SEAH] in other organisations but would not be surprised the same is said outside about my own. These are things you are the last to hear about.

Of the 33 organisations that we interviewed, only four of them had established specific policy documents or frameworks to address gender- or child protection-specific issues in their organisation. As such, it is clear that any effort on PSEAH amongst humanitarian agencies in DRC, including national and local NGOs, needs to be framed within a much wider effort to address harmful gender norms and beliefs that in practice normalise sexual harassment and other forms of SEAH. What was described by one informant as a total lack of any follow-up by relevant government authorities on complaints made in relation to SEAH by government officials involved in humanitarian response – which is a significant proportion of cases reported into the system – leaves international humanitarian agencies and national and local NGOs struggling in their efforts to both prevent and respond to incidents.

Implement ‘zero tolerance for inaction’, not ‘zero tolerance for incidents’ to encourage national/local NGOs to address PSEAH

Several national NGO interviewees highlighted the issue that they face, which is a fear that increased effort, scrutiny and transparency relating to PSEAH by their organisations may result in them becoming blacklisted by international agencies and their institutional donors. The impact of funding partners suspending or terminating partnerships in response to incidents of SEAH is explored more fully in the recent study commissioned by the Steering Committee for Humanitarian Response and the International Council of Voluntary Agencies. Clearer risk assessments and criteria for decision-making by donors are needed to allay the fears amongst staff about the consequences for their organisation of speaking out about abuse. As the director of one local NGO highlighted to us, even though his organisation has rolled out a programme to sensitise staff and project participants about their code of conduct and mechanisms to raise complaints in a safe and confidential manner:

they [staff and project participants] still continue to be afraid to denounce cases of abuse for fear of making the workers lose their jobs, for fear of reprisals, for fear of not seeing the justice involved, for fear of denouncing without any guarantee of their safety, so why should they denounce if nothing can be done to prevent the system from harming staff?

Demonstrate that the reporting of SEAH will lead to action to end the abuse, and not lead to survivors, their families or their community facing retaliation or being denied access to assistance

Both interviewees amongst international and national and local humanitarian organisations, and women rights activists, highlighted that a major barrier to any survivor reporting abuse, or any community member reporting any concerns about the potential for abuse of others, is a perception that it will not result in any follow-up action. Furthermore, many of them expressed a fear that reporting any such abuses would result in the survivors themselves or their family or community being denied assistance as a consequence, or worse repercussions.

One women’s rights NGO interviewee, for example, referred to the challenges faced in wider efforts to address GBV by armed groups and other powerholders, which have led to the victims who denounced their perpetrator being abducted, disappeared and worse. Examples were shared of where perpetrators of sexual violence associated with armed groups have been sentenced to prison for five years, but are then released after one to two months. Both amongst employees of national and local NGOs, and amongst the general community, this wider climate of impunity in relation to GBV and abuses of power by those in influential institutions resonates with and shapes their perception of how SEAH will be addressed – or not. As one survivor of SEAH told us: ‘If I denounce him, he will lose his job and God will punish me. I prefer to keep quiet and leave him to God.’ As such, any further effort on PSEAH in DRC needs to address this reality, or else little progress will be made.

Although this challenge is not specific to the role of national and local NGOs, it is local organisations that have roots in the local community and so through their practices in relation to PSEAH contribute to wider understanding about effective survivor-centred responses.

Leverage the potential of local women’s rights organisations and networks

Five representatives of local women-led NGOs and women’s rights NGO representatives were interviewed, and through the interviews it became apparent that they were not yet engaged at any strategic level in understanding PSEAH challenges or addressing them. In a number of contexts globally, the UN–NGO humanitarian coordination structure on GBV, the GBV Area of Responsibility (often titled GBV sub-cluster at country level), has sought to engage local women’s rights groups, networks and activists in their wider efforts on prevention and response to GBV. Amongst other things, this has included efforts to engage local women’s rights groups in facilitating or inputting to ‘audit’ processes to survey women and girls about risks and threats to their safety and their access to assistance and protection programmes in specific locations. These processes in contexts like the Syrian regional response and Colombia have revealed insights about PSEAH issues, which have then to varying degrees been followed up on by international and national humanitarian agencies. None of the local women’s rights groups that we interviewed had yet been engaged on such efforts in DRC.

Will we finally walk the talk?

Over the months that we conducted interviews and other research, there was a clear and ambitious scale-up in efforts on PSEAH in DRC, following up on the findings from the UN-NGO mission in December 2020. As such, we are encouraged that the coming months and years ahead should see a more effective approach by international, national and local organisations to addressing safeguarding abuses. However, our research also points to some very serious barriers to meaningful action, in relation to addressing SEAH risks in local organisations, and leveraging the potential positive contributions of local NGOs to the wider PSEAH effort.

To move beyond a tick box approach to engaging local NGOs on PSEAH, there needs to be a wider shift in partnerships between international agencies and their local partners, including support for multiyear capacity-strengthening and a more equitable, partnership-based approach to how resources are allocated, strategies are developed and initiatives to tackle SEAH are implemented. One-off trainings and the adoption of policies at a central level need to be followed up not only by more regular, on-going training and other steps to institutionalise PSEAH, but also a wider effort to address harmful gender norms. This means that both staff – male and female – and community members and project participants understand and believe that harassment and other abuses are not norms to be accepted, but rather unacceptable behaviours and practices that can be called out and prevented, and that survivors will be supported, rather than face repercussions for seeking assistance or trying to end the abuse. For this to happen, donor institutions and international agencies also need to adopt a ‘zero tolerance for inaction’ approach, rather than punish local organisations by ending partnerships and withdrawing funding when they report incidents or patterns of abuse and take appropriate action.

Lastly, whilst the level of understanding and action on PSEAH shared through our interviews is a concern, we were also encouraged by how numerous local NGO staff – both of national humanitarian organisations and local women’s organisations – expressed their willingness to contribute to a wider effort in the humanitarian sector to prevent and better respond to SEAH. Many of these individuals and their organisations know that such abuses take place, want to see an end to them and have expertise to contribute to that effort. The question now is whether donors and international humanitarian agencies are willing to invest the necessary resources and to partner meaningfully with them to do so. Will we now finally walk the talk?

Gang Karume Augustin is a bio-environmentalist and humanitarian researcher with more than two decades of experience in the humanitarian sector. He has worked as a consultant in charge of the Start Network/DRC hub development, held several international staff positions and currently serves as Technical Advisor for Rebuild Hope for Africa (RHA), a DRC national NGO. 

Thérèse Mema Mapenzi is the Director of Centre Olame Bukavu, a Congolese Women’s Organisation that provides psychological support to women in Eastern DRC. She is a trained psychologist and previously worked with the Archdiocese of Bukavu Justice and Peace Commission managing trauma centres.