Organisational Safeguarding Best Practices and Procedures

Organisational Safeguarding Best Practices and Procedures  
CTDC & WILPF | July 2021

The CTDC Toolkit, titled “Organisational Safeguarding Best Practices and Procedures: A Toolkit Towards Transnational Intersectional Feminist Accountability Frameworks to Respond to Exploitation, Assault, Abuse, Harassment and Bullying”, is a comprehensive resource developed by the Centre for Transnational Development and Collaboration (CTDC) in partnership with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Published in July 2021, this toolkit aims to provide organisations, particularly those operating in Arabic-speaking and Global South contexts, with a feminist, intersectional approach to safeguarding and accountability.

🔍 Purpose and Scope

The toolkit redefines safeguarding through a transnational, intersectional feminist lens that values both individual and collective accountability. It critiques mainstream safeguarding frameworks for being overly punitive, culturally insensitive, and narrowly focused on sexual misconduct. Instead, this resource promotes holistic responses that centre survivors, deconstruct power, and build structures of care, justice, and relational accountability within organisations and movements.

🧩 Structure and Content

The toolkit is grounded in six feminist conceptual axes and provides theoretical grounding, practical tools, and adaptable procedures:

• Relationality: Understanding social processes and relationships as the foundation of accountability systems.
• Feminist Governance & Power-Sharing: Encouraging shared leadership and the dismantling of harmful hierarchies.
• Feminist Accountability: Viewing accountability as ongoing, collective, and rooted in structural awareness.
• Restorative & Transformative Justice: Moving beyond punitive approaches to address harm through systemic change.
• Affect: Highlighting emotional impact as central to understanding abuse and building care-based responses.
• Agency & Intimate Power: Recognising the decision-making power of survivors and resisting victim-blaming.

The toolkit also includes:

• Extensive definitions and typologies of abuse (e.g., exploitation, bullying, harassment, discrimination).
• Power analysis frameworks across multiple dimensions (economic, emotional, relational, positional, etc.).
• Detailed accountability and complaints response mechanisms (including SOPs, risk assessments, and referral pathways).
• Tools for managing internal relationships, recruitment, board governance, and policy development.

🌟 Strengths and Contributions

• Intersectional Feminist Foundation: Frames safeguarding as a political and relational process that must consider positionality, structural inequality, and survivor affect.
• Culturally and Linguistically Rooted: Grounded in Arabic-language feminist theory and sociolinguistic analysis to ensure contextual relevance.
• Participatory Development: Draws on research with over 200 individuals from Syrian and Arabic-speaking CSOs.
• Practical Application: Offers clear tools, templates, and case-based scenarios for implementation.
• Addresses Gaps in Global Frameworks: Challenges dominant safeguarding norms, including the myth of prevention and the conflation of sex work with abuse.

⚠️ Considerations

• Implementation Guidance: While rich in conceptual content, organisations may require additional support or resources to effectively implement the toolkit's recommendations.
• Accessibility: The depth and complexity of the content may necessitate facilitation or training to ensure comprehensive understanding across all organisational levels.

✅ The CTDC Toolkit stands as a valuable resource for organisations seeking to embed feminist, intersectional principles into their safeguarding practices. Its comprehensive approach addresses both the theoretical underpinnings and practical applications of safeguarding, making it particularly beneficial for organisations in the Arabic-speaking and Global South contexts.

The CTDC Toolkit is one of the most robust, contextually grounded, and ethically sophisticated safeguarding resources available today. It redefines safeguarding as a relational, political, and cultural process—rather than a bureaucratic checklist—making it particularly powerful for feminist, decolonial, and localised practice.

👉 Access the full toolkit here and start building holistic, justice-driven safeguarding systems across your organisation and networks.