Rethinking PSHEA and the Future of Safeguarding in Ethiopia
Op-ed by Elshaday Surafel
Child and Youth Safeguarding and PSHEA Coordinator
In the humanitarian and development sector, Protection from Sexual Exploitation, Harassment and Abuse (PSHEA) is fundamentally about the responsible use of entrusted power. It requires organizations and individuals to prioritize the dignity, safety, and rights of the people they serve, particularly those who are most underserved.
In Ethiopia today, PSHEA can no longer be viewed solely as a humanitarian or safeguarding concept. It has become a critical national protection and development agenda. At its core, PSHEA seeks to ensure that no individual, especially children, adolescents, and women, is subjected to any form of sexual exploitation, abuse, harassment, or misconduct by those entrusted to support, protect, or serve them. This responsibility extends to every institution and actor involved in humanitarian, development, public, private, and community services.
For Ethiopia, the urgency is particularly significant given the multiple and overlapping crises the country is facing, including conflict, internal displacement, climate shocks, economic hardship, and weakening social support structures. These conditions significantly increase the vulnerability of children and young people to sexual exploitation and abuse, as well as to other forms of violence, neglect, and exploitation. At the same time, the growing number of local and international actors involved in humanitarian and development responses makes PSHEA an increasingly important national concern.
The hidden scale of safeguarding risks
Yet the visible picture does not always tell the whole story. From my experience working in PSHEA and the broader safeguarding, one of the most persistent challenges is that sexual harassment, exploitation, and abuse are often underreported. Stigma, fear of retaliation, unequal power relationships, dependency on perpetrators, limited awareness of reporting options, and a lack of trusted and accessible reporting mechanisms can all prevent people from speaking up. These risks are not confined to humanitarian and development settings; they can occur in homes, schools, institutions, workplaces, displacement settings, and increasingly in digital spaces, where online grooming, coercion, and other forms of exploitation can be particularly difficult to detect and address.
At its core, exploitation and abuse thrive where power imbalances exist. Whenever individuals hold authority, influence, resources, or control over others, there is a risk that such power may be misused. This reality reinforces why safeguarding cannot be treated as the responsibility of a single organization, profession, or sector. It is a collective moral, institutional, and national responsibility. Addressing these risks therefore requires more than responding to reported cases. It requires sustained investment in prevention, awareness, safe and accessible reporting mechanisms, survivor-centered support, accountable leadership, and systems that enable people to raise concerns without fear and ensure that those concerns are taken seriously and acted upon.
The implication is clear, if safeguarding is to become a meaningful national protection and development agenda, Ethiopia must look beyond incidents that are formally reported and strengthen the systems, behaviors, and cultures that prevent harm in the first place. This means creating environments where people understand their rights, recognize unacceptable behavior, know where to seek help, and can trust that concerns will be handled safely and responsibly. This is where the conversation must move from acknowledging the risks to rethinking how safeguarding is understood, embedded, and practiced across Ethiopia.
Rethinking safeguarding in Ethiopia
Encouragingly, Ethiopia has begun to move PSHEA beyond the boundaries of individual humanitarian organizations and toward a broader national protection agenda. An important development is the collaboration between government institutions and the Ethiopia PSEA Network on a draft Civil Service Code of Conduct on Protection from Sexual Exploitation and Abuse. This signals an important shift, safeguarding should not be viewed primarily as a donor requirement or organizational compliance obligation, but as a national standard of professional conduct and accountability across institutions and service-delivery systems.
Ethiopia also has important legal foundations for preventing exploitation, abuse, and harassment. The Constitution recognizes children’s right to protection from exploitation, while the Criminal Code provides legal protection against various forms of sexual abuse. Importantly, Labor Proclamation No. 1156/2019 explicitly prohibits sexual harassment and sexual assault in the workplace and establishes related responsibilities and protections within employment relationships. Together, these frameworks demonstrate that preventing sexual misconduct is not simply an internal organizational matter; it is connected to broader rights, employment, protection, and accountability obligations.
Yet laws and policies alone do not guarantee safety. Limited resources, shortages of trained safeguarding professionals, fragmented coordination, weak reporting and referral systems, stigma, and fear of retaliation can continue to prevent people from seeking help or reporting concerns. In some institutions, PSHEA may still be approached primarily as a compliance requirement rather than as part of ethical leadership, organizational culture, responsible service delivery, and the bigger safeguarding framework.
The challenge, therefore, is to move from having PSHEA policies to living actual safeguarding principles while ensuring that prevention, accountability, safe reporting, and respect for dignity are reflected in everyday decisions, behaviors, leadership, and service delivery. National responsibility begins when safeguarding becomes not an additional requirement, but a fundamental measure of how responsibly institutions use the power entrusted to them.
Across sectors and across the nation
If safeguarding is a shared national responsibility, it cannot remain confined to humanitarian and development organizations. Safer communities require every sector to understand its role in preventing harm, responding to concerns, and creating environments where people are treated with dignity and can speak up without fear. Government institutions have a critical role in strengthening policy implementation, oversight, and enforcement. Humanitarian and development actors must continue to model strong safeguarding practice and ensure accessible, survivor-centered support. Schools and educational institutions have a responsibility to create safe learning environments with trusted reporting and referral mechanisms, while faith-based and community institutions can help challenge harmful norms, reduce stigma, and promote dignity, respect, and protection.
The private sector is equally part of this safeguarding ecosystem. Businesses influence the lives of employees, customers, suppliers, partners, and communities, and therefore have a responsibility to establish clear standards of ethical conduct, prevent sexual harassment and exploitation, provide safe reporting channels, and maintain meaningful accountability. Safeguarding cannot be effective when responsibility stops at organizational boundaries; risks often cross institutions, sectors, and communities, making collaboration essential.
Moving forward, Ethiopia’s safeguarding agenda must therefore focus not only on strengthening policies, but on strengthening the systems and culture that make those policies meaningful. This includes investing in prevention and awareness, accessible and confidential reporting mechanisms, survivor-centered services, safe referral pathways, effective risk assessment, and fair and timely accountability. Investigation mechanisms must be sufficiently independent and credible, while survivors, witnesses, and whistleblowers must be protected from retaliation and further harm.
Most importantly, organizations and institutions need to move beyond demonstrating compliance toward building cultures in which safeguarding is reflected in leadership, decision-making, staff behavior, programme design, partnerships, and everyday interactions. Strong coordination through platforms such as the Ethiopia PSEA Network can help promote shared standards, learning, and collective accountability. Ultimately, a safer Ethiopia will not be created by one institution or one sector alone. It will be built when safeguarding becomes a shared value and a common practice across government, communities, civil society, humanitarian and development organizations, schools, faith institutions, and the private sector.
Compliance to culture: our safeguarding learnings for national adoption
At SOS Children’s Villages in Ethiopia, safeguarding is not treated as a standalone function or a checklist of requirements. It is an integrated way of working by bringing prevention, participation, risk management, accountability into a holistic child safeguarding, PSHEA, and anti-corruption approach where all relevant actors’ voices come together to create safer environments before harm occurs.
The shift from safeguarding as a compliance requirement to safeguarding as an organizational culture is not simply a theoretical one. At SOS Children's Villages in Ethiopia, our safeguarding journey has evolved from a strong focus on policies and procedures towards a much more preventive, risk-based and organization-wide approach. A key milestone in that journey has been the strengthening of integrated and holistic safeguarding systems, including clearer standards of conduct, focal point structures, staff and partner training, strong complaints and feedback mechanisms, and safeguarding risk assessments.
The focus has increasingly shifted towards living safeguarding as a culture and weaving it into everything we do. Safeguarding is no longer treated as a separate function, but as an integral part of how we work across all functions. In this journey, for me, the biggest shift has been making safeguarding everyone’s responsibility through an integrated and holistic approach. Policies provide the foundation, but culture comes from leadership commitment, continuous awareness, safer recruitment, codes of conduct, staff and partner training, accessible reporting mechanisms, and accountability when concerns arise.
Prevention at the core
The emphasis has increasingly moved upstream from responding to incidents to preventing them. As part of the bigger Safeguarding Strategy, our approach has totally shifted to prevention. We are increasingly asking practical questions through our risk assessments: “What could go wrong, and what can we do before harm happens?” That is where Do No Harm becomes part of everyday programming rather than simply a policy principle.
Safeguarding risk assessments, programme-level risk analysis, community consultations, safer distribution processes, service mapping and routine monitoring help us identify risks before they become incidents. Importantly, the participation of the communities, children and the youth we serve continue to be a basic requirement in this process as they often see risks that programme teams may not.
We have also learned that people cannot speak up about risks they do not recognize or do not feel safe reporting. This is why awareness, participation, and accessible feedback mechanisms are so important and have been an important part of strengthening safeguarding in our work. Children and communities need to understand their rights and know where and how to raise concerns; staff and volunteers need to understand professional boundaries and their responsibilities; and managers need to create an environment where speaking up is encouraged rather than feared.
Safeguarding becomes stronger when people are not just protected by the system but are part of the system. This is also where the principle of Do No Harm becomes practical: it needs to influence how programmes are designed, how services are delivered, how risks are assessed, and how communities participate in decisions that affect them.
The experience of one organization, however, cannot substitute for a national safeguarding system. The same principles of prevention, participation, accountability, and responsible use of power need to be reflected across the institutions and communities that children and other underserved people depend on.
A participatory approach
Safeguarding is most effective when communities, children, families, and institutions actively participate in identifying risks and shaping solutions. Communities are often the first to recognize warning signs, making meaningful participation, trusted relationships, and accessible feedback mechanisms essential. When children understand their rights, know what safe and unsafe behavior looks like, and have safe channels to raise concerns, and when institutions listen and respond responsibly, prevention becomes a shared responsibility and lasting behavioral change becomes possible.
Awareness remains one of the most powerful foundations of prevention. Many incidents persist because individuals do not recognize exploitative behavior or are unaware of safe reporting options. Effective prevention goes beyond informing people about misconduct; it builds the knowledge, confidence, skills, and systems needed to recognize risks early and act safely. Regular awareness raising and practical training, clear standards of behavior and codes of conduct, safer recruitment and supervision, accessible and confidential reporting channels, survivor-centered support and referral pathways, timely and fair response procedures, and routine participatory risk assessments help address risks before harm occurs. When these measures are embedded in everyday practice and informed by community voices, safeguarding shifts from responding to incidents to building a culture where harm is actively anticipated, prevented, reported, and addressed.
Safeguarding as a shared national priority
Ethiopia’s future depends, in many ways, on whether its children and young people are protected today. A child exposed to exploitation, abuse, or other forms of harm may carry its consequences throughout life. Safeguarding is therefore more than a humanitarian concern or an organizational obligation; it is an investment in human dignity, social cohesion, national development, and the human capital on which Ethiopia’s future depends.
The experience of organizations such as SOS Children’s Villages in Ethiopia demonstrates that meaningful safeguarding is possible when prevention, participation, risk management, accountability, and responsible use of power are integrated into everyday practice. These principles, however, should not remain within individual organizations. They offer practical lessons that can inform safeguarding across government institutions, humanitarian and development actors, schools, communities, faith-based institutions, businesses, and civil society. With millions of people affected by crises and thousands of actors involved in supporting communities, protecting children and underserved populations must become a shared national commitment.
This means moving beyond preventing individual incidents to building institutions, communities, and systems where people are safe, heard, respected, and empowered to speak up; where risks are identified before harm occurs; where reporting is accessible and trusted; and where concerns are handled with confidentiality, fairness, and accountability. It means making safeguarding part of how we design programmes, recruit and manage people, deliver services, engage communities, exercise leadership, and make decisions, not something added after the fact.
Ultimately, safeguarding is about how we understand and use the power entrusted to us. The choices we make today will shape not only the safety of the people we serve, but also the kind of society we build for tomorrow. A safer Ethiopia will be one where safeguarding is not simply a policy, a procedure, or a sectoral responsibility, but a shared value and everyday practice so that every child and young person can grow up with dignity, protected from harm, able to speak up, and empowered to realize their full potential.
Footnote:
Elshaday Surafel is a Child and Youth Safeguarding and PSHEA Coordinator at SOS Children’s Villages in Ethiopia, a nongovernmental organization operating nationally to create safe and nurturing environments where children and young people can thrive.