Welcome
Welcome to The South2South Network: a new consultancy for children, young people, and vulnerable adults safeguarding. ChildHope and our partners have long championed the need for child protection and safeguarding systems that make sense for the people implementing them, and the children benefitting from them. ChildHope’s consultancy work over recent years – supporting organisations to develop, strengthen and implement safeguarding measures – has further cemented in our minds that the best people to support those implementing programmes for the most marginalised children and adults are those with their own experience of working with children and adults in those settings.
Up to the Minute News:
A peer to peer model of consultancy
At ChildHope, we’ve developed a different kind of relationship with partners. Rather than finding organisations to meet our agenda, our key focus has been to support partners to build their capacity in whichever area they’re working in. Our partners largely focus on children who are at the extreme end of marginalisation and who are ignored by many other organisations. Together, we have developed ways to work effectively with the children who are most vulnerable. For many years, we’ve said that partners need to have their own, contextually relevant child protection/safeguarding/PSEA (Prevention of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse) policies and have worked with them to build, strengthen and embed those policies, to review them and to give appropriate training to staff members in order to implement them.
This approach means that these partners are now in a strong position, with the skills and capabilities to train peer organisations in their own countries and regions. They are able to develop tailored support for other organisations that comes from an understanding of what it’s really like to try to implement good child protection, safeguarding and PSEA practice in those countries. This can only be a good thing for the children and adults that we are all working to support. As our South2South Network is part of our mission to drive commitment to safeguarding, child protection and PSEA we aim for our services to be good value for money as well as highly contextualised and practical.
The South2South Network is already having an impact. In our first year alone, 137 organisations commissioned training for 434 staff and board members in six different countries. Almost 65,000 children were reached. We also have ChildHope safeguarding consultants based in the UK who come with lived experience and southern perspective of the practicalities of applied safeguarding, child protection and PSEA. Our consultants have supported organisations based in the north favouring safeguarding, child protection and PSEA training that is truly practical and relevant for working with their partners and networks on the ground. Our UK team also supports continuous learning, peer-to-peer training, and community of practice to ever strengthen our service.
If you are looking for a different way to develop your safeguarding, child protection and PSEA policy and practice, then we would welcome the chance to speak with you.
Nicky Davies
Executive Director, ChildHope