Safeguarding Consultant

Safeguarding Consultant
LOCATION - REMOTE
ABOUT YLABS
YLabs is a leading global design and research organization designing technologies that amplify youth power, agency, and opportunity. Founded in 2014 at the Harvard Innovation Lab, YLabs partners with young people to co-create inclusive digital products and services that improve their lives. Our design process opens spaces where young people’s ideas can become a reality – where they are the architects of the solutions to their most pressing challenges.
YLabs multidisciplinary team delivers youth-driven innovation and impact at scale. Our team combines expertise in youth-driven design with adolescent health, climate, livelihoods, digital product design, behavioral science, and epidemiology. Based in Rwanda and the USA, we’ve worked in 18 countries to date on projects spanning three focus areas: optimum health and wellness, improved economic opportunity, and increased climate resilience.
Find out more about our projects here: https://www.ylabsglobal.org/work
Scope of work
We are seeking a Safeguarding Consultant to help us ensure that our safeguarding system meets recognized standards and that our own team can run without ongoing external support. The consultancy has four objectives:
Assess our current safeguarding practice against the Keeping Children Safe International Child Safeguarding Standards, major donor requirements, and the laws of our priority fieldwork countries.
Validate and refine who owns what across functions, and recommend a sustainable permanent staffing model.
Strengthen the policies, processes and tools for safe recruitment, fieldwork, partners and incident response.
Review our training and build internal capacity so that YLabs staff can deliver and maintain the system.
Proposed Activities
Phase 1: Baseline (Week 1 to 3)
Review existing policies, protocols, training materials, contracts and our internal responsibility map.
Interview Operations, Programs, the Global Safeguarding Lead, Impact and project teams.
Score current practice against the industry standards and identify priority gaps.
Produce a short context note for each fieldwork country covering police clearance or good-conduct certificate options and lead times, mandatory reporting duties, age of consent and majority, and data protection law.
Agree on a prioritized workplan for Phase 2.
Phase 2: Build (week 4 to 11)
Roles and staffing: Review our responsibility map and decision rights, including go/no-go authority for high-risk fieldwork. Recommend a permanent staffing model with an estimate of the time safeguarding takes per project. Draft safeguarding language for relevant job descriptions.
Policies: Review our global policy suite (safeguarding, child protection, code of conduct, data protection, ethical images, risk assessment templates/matrices) and identify gaps and revise, including what an AI policy should cover. Build a requirements matrix showing how YLabs policy meets industry standards guidelines and donor requirements.
Safe recruitment: Reference check template with safeguarding questions, interview questions, self-declaration form, and validation of our pre-fieldwork clearance checklist.
Fieldwork: Templates for the project safeguarding protocol, risk assessment and go/no-go decision, plus a practical approach to daily field monitoring. This will also cover how safeguarding risks to YLabs staff and field teams are reflected in field protocols.
Participants: Guidance on how young participants can raise concerns, youth consent, safeguarding in digital and phone-based engagement, and use of images and stories.
Partners and vendors: Due diligence checklist, standard contract clauses, and guidance on data sharing agreements.
Incident response: Reporting and escalation protocol, including donor notification within required timeframes, survivor-centred response guidance, and options for referring investigations.
Training: Review our core curriculum and project briefings, revise materials, design role-based training for Ops, Project Leads and Project Safeguarding Leads, and recommend external training.
Oversight and costing: A short set of indicators for a quarterly leadership dashboard, an annual review cycle, and guidance on costing safeguarding into proposals and budgets.
Phase 3: Handover (weeks 12 to 14)
Run train-the-trainer sessions for the Global Safeguarding Lead and Project Safeguarding Leads.
Hold a handover session with Operations and Programs.
Deliver a final report with a 12-month roadmap.
DELIVERABLES
Phase 1: Baseline
Weeks 1 to 3
Inception note and agreed workplan (week 1)
Assessment of the gaps
Phase 2: Build
Weeks 4 to 11
Roles, decision rights and permanent staffing model recommendation
Safe recruitment toolkit
Revised policies and requirements matrix, Incident reporting and escalation protocol. Additionally vendor guidelines
Fieldwork toolkit: protocol, risk assessment and go/no-go templates
Participant reporting, consent and digital engagement guidance
Revised training materials and external training recommendations
Oversight dashboard indicators and costing guidance
Phase 3: Handover
Weeks 12 to 14
Train-the-trainer sessions and handover session
Final report with 12-month roadmap
Consultant profile

Employment type
Contractor

Work arrangement
Yes