Introducing a safeguarding culture in research institutions: a multi-national partnership

Research projects have a responsibility to safeguard their staff and research participants by treating them with respect and dignity and protecting them from harm. This is especially important in international development partnerships where substantial imbalances in power relations, resources and research governance structures are common. Demands for evidence and sharing of good practice about how international research partnerships can enhance safeguarding cultures in partners' institutions are increasing. However, these partnerships are missing opportunities to amplify their projects' impact beyond the project team and research focus.

Our multi-national implementation research partnership is focused on patient-centred care for sickle cell disease in Africa and involves participatory approaches with community members and vulnerable patients. After establishing a project safeguarding plan and training, partners were keen to extend a safeguarding culture to their own institutions. We describe how our safeguarding trainers tailored the project's approach and resources to introduce the concept of safeguarding in their institutions and set up training in four diverse contexts in Ghana, Nigeria and Zambia.

Lessons to apply to other research partnerships have been synthesised by comparing common factors which helped and hindered their efforts. These included jointly developing tools to identify safeguarding risks, using the projects' establishing safeguarding processes, flexibility in the use of training resources, supporting institutionally influential safeguarding trainers, engaging institutional leaders as safeguarding advocates, embedding safeguarding within institutional systems, and planning for sustainability.

Influencing institutional culture change to embed safeguarding approaches is a long process and is unlikely to be achieved within the lifetime of a short-term project. However, with careful planning and encouragement from research funders, the activities and resources within a research partnership can go well beyond simply delivering the primary research outputs. Even within 2-3 years they can be used to lever substantial impact on the safeguarding culture in partners' institutions.