Introduction As women, educators and youth workers, protecting – safeguarding – children – in our case young women and girls – from harm is something we know to be important in our work across Africa. Project GROW brought us together to learn more about safeguarding and child protection, working with an expert trainer. Each organisation […]
Author Archives: Project GROW
When we, as youth organisations, started our work on safeguarding, many of us felt that we were already working hard to ensure that the young women and girls we work with were safe in our care. Apart from anything else, most of our work involved women leaders working with young women and girls in female-only […]
Sometimes we feel we are doing things well, our projects benefit the women and girls in our community, and we don’t need a safeguarding policy. This was one of the challenges we faced when developing our safeguarding policies and procedures. Staff felt that the introduction of a safeguarding policy was a criticism of them, or […]
Youth workers working with children and young people often feel overwhelmed already. There is so much need in our African communities, whether urban or rural. There is so much deficit in the education that girls receive in many schools, so much they need to learn to prepare for good jobs and futures, and so many […]
It’s essential that youth workers and youth organisations can recognise the signs and symptoms of abuse. Every safeguarding policy needs to include definitions of what safeguarding is and the definitions and signs of abuse. How youth organisations talk about abuse isn’t universal Defining abuse isn’t straightforward, because how you define it within your organisation will […]
As youth workers working with young women and girls over a period of time, we get to know them. If their behaviour changes in some way, we notice it, because we are concerned about them. We may praise them when they seem to be developing better habits but also find ourselves criticising or punishing children […]
As women from different African countries and cultural backgrounds, one of the challenges we had was identifying who needed safeguarding. When we use the term, ‘child protection’, which some of us may be more familiar with, we exclude other vulnerable people, and also open ourselves up to debate on who is or isn’t an adult. […]
In our discussions on abuse, we realised that each of us had different ideas of what was, or wasn’t abuse. Many youth workers involved in this process experienced physical punishments at home and school. We know that this type of discipline is still common in many parts of Africa (as well as other parts of […]
It’s important to have your policy clearly written down so that everyone knows what is in it, and when everyone is under pressure in a safeguarding situation you all know what to do, when and how. Always improving Even if you do have something written down, it is a good idea to review it. Does […]
Sometimes when we think of where women and girls are at risk, we focus on the risks we know and understand. Our understanding of risk depends on our experiences of safety and danger in our lives. It can be hard to understand or imagine the risks that other people face, especially if, within our cultures, […]