Photo: Gabriel Rivera, Advisor for child protection in Central America
Gabriel Rivera is a Nicaraguan lawyer by profession and an expert in public policy and children's rights. He has over fifteen years of experience consulting and advising international organizations, NGOs, and public sector institutions, providing innovative solutions for designing, implementing, and evaluating social impact policies and programs. His areas of expertise include strategic planning, legislative analysis, public policy design, and formulating child protection and safeguarding policies in civil and faith-based organizations.
Since 2021, Gabriel has accompanied close to 40 partner organizations of DKA/kfb Austria and Horizont3000 in their process of formulating and updating safeguarding policies and their subsequent implementation, setting up monitoring systems, and creating “child-friendly” versions of the policies.
Photo: Gabriel Rivera during a session of the Central American regional team's monitoring & evaluation workshop in San Salvador in August this year
How did you get professionally involved in the field of safeguarding and what motivated you, as a lawyer, to focus your career in this specific area?
Gabriel: While studying law, I explored various fields for specialization, but it was a course in Human Rights near the end of my studies that changed my path. Inspired by the course, I decided to step away from the conventional legal track and dedicate myself to the study, advocacy, and defense of human rights.
After graduating, I started working in a consulting firm specializing in this particular field at first and later earned my master’s degree in social policy and children’s rights, which allowed me to work as a consultant for multiple major international organizations here in my home country, Nicaragua. I facilitated processes for strategic planning, project design, systematization and evaluation, and formulating protection policies.
Since 2012, I've had the rewarding opportunity to help over twenty civil society organizations develop safeguarding policies for children and adolescents—a process made uniquely enriching by lacking a one-size-fits-all manual or model. We had to learn to develop them through a participatory process involving all stakeholders and, perhaps most importantly, incorporating the expectations of children and adolescents.
How would you define protection and protection policies in terms of both state policies and NGO policies?
Gabriel: Well, there are some major differences between public policies and institutional safeguarding policies. Public policy is formulated by the state, primarily to address social issues like violence prevention, and defines strategies for public institutions to implement to reduce it and punish offenders.
In contrast, an institutional protection policy is created by an international, civil, or faith-based organization to ensure that its staff and operations do not harm the children and adolescents they come into contact with, directly or indirectly. It’s an internal regulatory document aimed at protecting children and adolescents participating in the organization’s activities from any form of violence, discrimination, or neglect.
While safeguarding policies cast a wide net, aiming to protect all staff and target groups, child protection policies are significantly more focused, zeroing in specifically on the needs of children and adolescents. These targeted policies are essential, as they address aspects of child protection often overlooked by broader safeguarding frameworks.
How can an organization ensure that safeguarding and child protection policies are not only understood and accepted but actively upheld by all employees?
Gabriel: A participatory approach to policy formulation is essential; it lends legitimacy to the process and fosters a sense of ownership over the policies and their values. For instance, when working with horizont3000's partner organizations, we ensured that all staff members and target groups were involved—particularly children and their parents. This participatory dynamic has without a doubt enriched the final product – the policies as such - by including the perspectives and proposals of the subjects of the protection policies, allowing us to understand situations and contexts often unseen from an office. Overall, I would argue that a participatory policy formulation process is essential. Another key aspect is that once formulated, the policy must be communicated to the organization’s staff and all its relevant stakeholders and target groups. It’s important for the policy to be understandable.
Gabriel Rivera: “A safeguarding policy isn’t enough on paper - it must be embraced and lived by everyone involved.”
Understandable in what sense? Linguistically, you mean?
Gabriel: Yes, exactly. The policy should be accessible, clear, and non-technical in terms of language. Since policies are institutional documents, they tend to be drafted in a very technical language, so it’s important to create more friendly and “accessible” versions of them to make them understandable to children, adolescents, their parents, and community members in general. It will be much easier for these groups to understand a well-illustrated, visually attractive, and concise document that is on point and summarizes the key ideas of the policy, rather than a very long and complex text. Additionally, whether in technical or accessible language, these policies must be also be communicated. Organizations should therefore train their staff members in the content of these policies; simply developing them is not enough.
Through training workshops, for example?
Gabriel: You, there are various different formats that can be used. These shorter, illustrated and let’s say “user-friendly” versions should be widely shared in both print and digital formats, social media posts, posters, and other mediums relevant to each organization’s context. Capacity-building workshops on these policies can also be conducted for the organization’s staff so that everyone knows what’s expected of them in relation to child protection. Talks about the policy are often more appropriate for dissemination to target groups.
When an organization like horizont3000 creates and implements safeguarding policies around the globe, it faces a very diverse set of cultural, legal, and political contexts, depending on where the policy is implemented. Given that each culture may define a child, a vulnerable person, or even an act of abuse differently, how do these contexts influence the creation and dissemination of protection policies?
Gabriel: I think the fundamental point here is to emphasize that the responsibility to protect, not to harm anyone, and not to commit violence or discriminate against others, is not subject to cultural relativism. Everyone has the right to be protected, and this responsibility to protect is non-negotiable.
Sorry to interrupt you here, but I’d like to draw up an example. In Latin America, but also parts of Southern Europe, physical contact, even in work environments, is much more common and normal than in other parts of the world. Hugging someone at work or patting a colleague on the shoulder is widely accepted and conventional. However, the same gestures might be considered an invasion of personal space in a different country or region, a different religious or a different cultural context…
Gabriel: That’s true, but again: The fundamental and underlying principle of any safeguarding policy is the universal right to be protected from any form of violence, discrimination, or situations that may threaten or violate rights, along with the obligation not to harm others. I return to what I said earlier: The fundamental principle of the policy is the obligation not to cause harm to others; this is non-negotiable and, in general terms, not subject to what I call cultural relativism. Implementing a policy on a global scale in different multicultural contexts like those where horizont3000 operates is therefore challenging.
We must ensure that all stakeholders, regardless of the geographical location or different cultural contexts, understand and commit to protecting, respecting, and treating others with dignity—whether they are coworkers, men, women, or children involved in our activities. To achieve this, it’s necessary to develop training and awareness-creation processes that help staff understand the essence of our policy and what protection means within their respective cultural context. We need to discuss what protection entails and set clear boundaries that are not open to cultural relativism. Issues like physical contact and personal space vary by location, but our policies must provide clear guidelines for everyone to follow. For example, in Central America, our child protection policies prohibit any physical contact that could be considered inappropriate or improper.
Could you share an experience or a concrete example where implementing a protection policy required adapting to local cultural and social challenges?
Gabriel: Certainly. One of the most interesting multicultural challenges was implementing such a policy in Guatemala, where our organizations work with children, adolescents, and adults from various Indigenous communities. We started by ensuring that the policies were formulated with the explicit participation of children, adolescents, and adults from different Indigenous groups so that as a result, the policy would incorporate important multicultural elements. However, we faced the challenge of disseminating these policies in communities that don’t speak any Spanish but rather indigenous Mayan languages like K’iche’. This highlighted the need to translate the policies and communicate them sensitively within each cultural context to reach these important audiences in their language.
Another challenge is that some cultural practices normalize or justify human rights violations, such as the physical punishment of children. Many parents consider it acceptable to hit or shout at their children. For us, physical punishment and verbal violence are unacceptable and considered forms of violence. Children are sometimes pressured into participating in certain activities, such as sports activities, although they don’t actually want to join. We believe participation should be free and voluntary, so no child should be forced into an activity they don’t wish to participate in. We need to ensure that our staff understands the key principles of these policies to apply them in various contexts.
Gabriel Rivera: "The responsibility to protect is not subject to cultural relativism."
Certainly, measuring the success of any institutional policy is important. What indicators are typically used to evaluate the success of protection efforts after implementing a safeguarding policy?
Gabriel: A policy on paper is not enough; it needs to become an everyday practice, something truly lived and not left to chance. Building this kind of commitment requires active nurturing at every level of the organization—and that means real, ongoing effort. For policies to be implemented, there needs to be a person or body within the organization responsible for promoting them.
In Central America, these policies created Protection Commissions made up of three to five members from the same organization who are responsible for driving policy implementation and for receiving, investigating, and resolving protection-related complaints. Additionally, it’s essential to track our progress and identify challenges during implementation. For this, the Protection Commission should carry out regular monitoring—every six months or annually—to assess progress in meeting institutional responsibilities and applying protection measures.
We designed a monitoring system where, during the first quarter of each year, each organization fills out a form reporting progress in implementing key institutional responsibilities, such as policy dissemination, establishing procedures to ensure staff suitability, applying protection measures in activities with children, and the functioning of the Protection Commission. They also report complaints received and how they were resolved, making it clear that any complaint related to criminal matters must be immediately reported.
Could you share any lessons learned from failures and how organizations can avoid repeating them? Or common mistakes that lead to policy failure?
Gabriel: A very common but nonetheless fatal mistake is developing and implementing the policy without then disseminating it among the organization’s staff and the target groups served. The result of this mistake is automatically going to be a low level of policy implementation. The only way a policy gets implemented successfully is by communicating it to the people. When children and adolescents know their rights, they demand enforcement of these rights. For example, they might tell you that activities should be cancelled if it rains heavily or that snacks should be healthy and served at the time agreed upon. Additionally, it’s essential to have someone or a body within the organization responsible for promoting policy implementation throughout the institution.
And usually, in what organizational department do these people work?
Gabriel: Well, we’re not necessarily talking about a specific department that is always in charge, but rather a team made up of people and staff members who work in different departments of the organization (management, administration…) who are jointly responsible for advancing the safeguarding policy. It’s a challenge because our organizations have increasingly smaller teams, often due to a lack of resources, and most people tend to have multiple roles.
Another challenge is that implementing certain aspects of protection policies requires funding. Many things can be achieved through commitment and willingness, but some aspects do need financial support, like printing policies for distribution among children and adolescents. Hiring drivers, for example, with well-maintained, safe vehicles that have insurance also increases costs. If we need accommodation and our policy specifies that it must be in a safe place, that will also have implications for the budget, as a secure and well-located hotel may be more expensive. Therefore, it’s essential that organizations diligently calculate and include these costs in their projects and that donors are open to funding the necessary items to meet policy requirements.
