At the start of the new financial year, we want to share what the KCS team has been up to these past months. Read on to find some highlights and achievements we are proud of, as we continue to work to strengthen child safeguarding practices around the world.
Expanding our reach
Between 2024 and the beginning of 2025 we planned and launched new programmes in Brazil and Africa. These two initiatives allow us to have a more global vision, better impact around the world and offer improved support to organisations and practitioners based in these areas. We can now offer resources and assistance in Portuguese and French, which has been also helpful to speakers of these languages that live outside these areas. We are happy to be able to broaden our support and are continuing to work to become established in these locations and contribute to the improvement of the child safeguarding frameworks and policies in place.
Including children’s voices
Last year, we worked on and released the child-friendly version of the International Child Safeguarding Standards. This resource was designed to help organisations make their policies and procedures accessible to children, promoting that they understand their rights and know which behaviours are correct or incorrect from the adults or organisations that surround them. The publication of these standards was the result of extensive consultation and practical experience: they were produced with children as part of a global consultation and during workshops with children and youth in Spain and Uruguay. A range of diverse organisations and field professionals are already applying them in their work with children.
Sharing knowledge
All through the year we continuously worked to enable more exchange and learning opportunities for our community. We did so by offering workshops, online courses, practical learning opportunities and more. The past year’s webinars focused on two, key themes: developing child-friendly safeguarding materials and communications and implementing effective safeguarding monitoring tools. Both topics included resources and frameworks previously developed by KCS, which are now available online and have been shared widely and cited among child safeguarding practitioners, becoming a go-to resource for professionals seeking practical tools.
Certifying good practices
It has been rewarding to see an increased interest for applying child safeguarding practices from a diverse range of organisations – more and more professionals are taking into account how essential it is to have a framework to work with to protect children from harm. We have had the pleasure to walk many organisations through the process of being certified, which includes doing an extensive audit of their work, helping them map areas of improvement, developing child safeguarding policies that fit their needs and are truly sustainable for their activities. Our work with education providers, family support services and other child-focused entities last year has directly impacted hundreds of schools and child centres, which means even more children are enjoying safer environments and benefiting from these organisations’ effort to reflect on their practices and make lasting improvements by integrating child safeguarding in all areas of their work.
Supporting Human Rights defenders
Another important milestone in 2024, was our contribution to the development of a safeguarding policy for an organisation working with women in Mexico and Central America who have been targeted for their human rights activism. This collaboration started a fruitful conversation within the organisation, which helped them visualise the areas of their work that needed to be reinforced and concentrate their efforts into improving them.
Our Capacity Building work this past year has been defined by practical action, shared learning and a steady growth in demand for effective child safeguarding practices. While there is still much to do, we are encouraged by the commitment of our community to making children’s environments safer. We look forward to continuing this work alongside organisations and practitioners who share our mission.