PAULA GIL: My name is Paula Gil. I’m the president of the Spanish section of Doctors Without Borders. The leadership skills that I have used to bring about improvements in safeguarding in MSF Spain are based on fostered a culture of respect and trust, leading with empathy. I think that is essential to be responsible and transparent in the way that, as leaders, we use the power we have. It is key to accept, as well, that we have vulnerabilities, that we are vulnerable, and the privileges we have, and promote honest and respectful communication among us.

People need to understand that we have all an important contribution to make successful our mission, and we will ensure that our own conduct is free from any form of abuse, harassment, or discrimination.

MANDY JONES: I’m Mandy Jones. I’m head of global safeguarding at Oxfam Great Britain. In Oxfam, what we talk about is, how do you show up in your work? It’s about protecting people who come into contact with Oxfam. And we want to work in a way that restores power, rebalances power. When we talk about leadership skills, it’s more about the way in which we work with others that’s crucially important and ensuring that we are an embodiment of our organisation’s values.

ANDREW AZZOPARDI: I’m Andrew Azzopardi. I’m the head of safeguarding of the Catholic Church in Malta. Seven years ago, the Catholic Church in Malta decided to start the Safeguarding Commission. We started at the point where the Church’s reputation was similar to the reputation around the world, where the Church covers up, they don’t report to the police. The approach I chose as the head of safeguarding – which the Church supported me in that, the leadership of the church – was to have a transparent approach. What does that mean? That means that we present to the media our statistics. We have a press conference every year. The media can ask me any question they want.

Before, the Church used to be afraid of questions of the media when it comes to allegations of abuse. So, they used to keep back to answering. We always answer. We mostly always attend when we’re invited to television programmes, radio programmes. We chose that approach of dialogue with the community.

EMMANUEL MURANGIRA: My name is Emmanuel Murangira, Tearfund country director for Rwanda. So, my first approach to safeguarding was to inspire people into understanding what it actually means to keep children and vulnerable adults safe and what that would mean to our work and to the society generally. And once we pretty well identified with the idea, it became easier for them to actually begin to apply all the safeguarding policy here in the organisation, but also with the communities that we work with and other organisations that we partner with.

KAREN BARNETT: I’m Karen Barnett. I am the director of safeguarding at Mercy Corps. All of our country directors and our team members want to implement safeguarding. They want to get it right. So, it’s really important that I create the space for leaders and other team members to speak up and say, this is going to be particularly challenging in this context, for this reason. This is going to work. We might have to think through how we do this in a different way. Or you can you provide support around having this type of conversation in this particular community?

And I’ve found that one really needs to develop the relationships and ensure that we create safe spaces for people to raise those concerns, or they will go forward with those concerns and fears and not raise them, and our implementation is not as strong as it could be.

PHILIPPA TUBB: I’m Philippa Tubb, the designated safeguarding lead at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. I would say we’ve adopted a participatory approach to safeguarding here. But there are also elements of transformational leadership and coaching within that. So, we need to develop non-permissive work cultures where it isn’t acceptable to behave in certain ways or to discuss certain things and where people are willing to call poor behaviour out very quickly, whether that behaviour is about bullying, harassment, or sexual harassment. So, I think you’ve got to think about wider organisational cultures, not just specifically about safeguarding.

PAULA GIL: In terms of leadership, something that is clearly working is to have regular prevention activities. To adapt the prevention activities to the different cultures, we have made important changes, and we have made a lot of mistakes at the beginning. Something that does not work at all is to give rules without discussing them.

KAREN BARNETT: It’s never one conversation. It’s never one initiative. It needs to be ongoing. Leadership needs to model caring about safeguarding, and keeping it top of mind, and having those repeated conversations.

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