How to develop or improve a complaint response mechanism (CRM) to receive safeguarding concerns.

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What is a CRM?

A complaints response mechanism is a way for communities who benefit from your organisational projects and activities to raise safeguarding concerns and complaints. Safeguarding concerns, however, do need to be dealt with differently from other complaints since such concerns are sensitive and confidential.

The Core Humanitarian Standard which you read in unit 3 is a standard that has been signed up to by many international organisations working in the humanitarian sector. There is both a short plain language and more detailed version of the nine commitments on the website.

Under Commitment 5, communities and people affected by crisis should have access to safe and responsive mechanisms to handle complaints. Complaints should be welcomed and addressed. This would include the principle that complaints regarding ‘programming, sexual exploitation and abuse, and other abuses of power’ are separated from other forms of project-based complaints and escalated immediately to the safeguarding focal points at field level and/or designated safeguarding officers at senior management level for them to be dealt with confidentially and in a timely way.