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Many organisations have child safeguarding policies and dedicated teams but struggle to ensure good practices are implemented consistently across locations.
With 32 locations across the country, SOS Children’s Villages India faced a challenge to maintain a consistent and structured approach to child safeguarding across their activities.
Already aligned with the Indian legal framework and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, they saw the KCS Certification as an opportunity to independently assess and strengthen their safeguarding practices in line with the International Child Safeguarding Standards: a globally recognised reference of child safeguarding.
When starting the certification process, they hoped to address three main goals:
- Strengthen accountability and transparency in safeguarding practices
- Ensure a consistent and structured approach across all locations
- Reinforce trust among children, families, donors, partners and other stakeholders
The organisation explained that their decision to pursue KCS certification was ‘driven by a strong commitment to ensure the highest standards of protection for children and young people across all our programmes and operations’.
Through an evaluation of each location, the certification process identifies strengths and inconsistencies. SOS Children’s Villages India states that ‘the certification process across all locations provided an opportunity for self-reflection and understand the uniformity of safeguarding practices throughout the programmes’.
After successfully achieving the KCS Certification, the team has identified that the process contributed to three fundamental improvements in their safeguarding framework:
Stronger Reporting Mechanisms
Standardisation Across Locations
Increased Monitoring and Integration
We are glad to see SOS Children’s Villages India committed to strengthening their child safeguarding practices and celebrate that this process has been fruitful for the organisation, whose team stated: ‘the certification process has helped embed safeguarding as a core organisational priority, moving beyond compliance to a culture of prevention, vigilance and continuous improvement’.
Whether your organisation is beginning its safeguarding journey or has established frameworks in place, KCS Certification can help you strengthen your child safeguarding practices.