Safeguarding means taking all reasonable steps to prevent harm, particularly sexual exploitation, abuse and harassment from occurring; to protect people, especially vulnerable adults and children, from that harm; and to respond appropriately when harm does occur.
Our safeguarding policy states that IMC employees and associated personnel must not:
Read the policy in full here.
Adele Monk – People Team, Safeguarding Manager
Adele.Monk@imcworldwide.com
Kat Hancock – Business Improvement, Safeguarding point of contact for overseas programmes
Kathryn.Hancock@imcworldwide.com
Suraj Rana – Regional Director for South & South East Asia, Safeguarding Director
Suraj.Rana@imcworldwide.com
IMC welcomes reports and the sharing of safeguarding concerns. If you would like to raise a concern or ask for advice please contact Kathryn.Hancock@imcworldwide.com or another member of the Safeguarding Team. We are happy to discuss anything that you are not sure about, give you more information and support you.
IMC considers any report as an opportunity to learn, develop and improve. It is important that we hear back about how our safeguarding procedures are performing so that we can better protect people.
IMC has a zero-tolerance stand on exploitative and abusive relationships. Safeguarding applies consistently and without exception across our programmes, partners and employees.
It requires proactively identifying, preventing and guarding against all risks of harm, exploitation and abuse and having mature, accountable and transparent systems for response, reporting and learning when risks materialise. Those systems must be survivor-centred, and also protect those accused until proven guilty.
IMC’s safeguarding framework is based on the three pillars of Prevention, Reporting, Response. As such our procedures and guidance to programme teams is framed against each of these pillars.
IMC values collaboration with our partners on how to manage and mitigate safeguarding risks. As such we have developed a briefing note for partner organisations that mirrors our own organisational safeguarding framework. If you are looking to establish or develop the safeguarding procedures in your organisation you might find it helpful. The note can be viewed here.
We welcome conversations about the applying this framework to our bids and our programmes. If you would like to discuss this, please get in touch with our bid team or Kat Hancock.
On 18 October, the UK Department for International Development (DFID) hosted a key summit in London to drive collective action to address and prevent sexual exploitation and abuse, and sexual harassment. IMC sat on the summit steering committee as a representative of the private sector alongside Oxford Policy Management. As such, we developed a series of commitments to four strategic shifts that DFID had set out related to wider reforms to improve safeguarding.
To read the UK private sector commitment document it can be found on the DFID website here.
Since the International Safeguarding Summit in October 2018, IMC has been working with British Expertise International to establish the Safeguarding Leads Network (SLN). To date there are 30 organisations signed up to be part of the network. The SLN meet every other month to discuss technical safeguarding challenges. We also have a heads of business group who meet quarterly to discuss strategic safeguarding issues and ways to collaborate more across the development sector.
If you would like to join the SLN LinkedIn Group, please request to join here. For more information about signing up to the Private Sector Commitments and joining the SLN please write to Kat Hancock.
