Safeguarding Consultant

Location: Remote
Employer: YLabs
Contract type: Consultancy (contractor)
Contract duration: About 14 weeks
Closing date: 10 November 2026, 09:00 CAT

About YLabs

YLabs is a global design and research organisation that designs technologies to amplify youth power, agency and opportunity. Founded in 2014 at the Harvard Innovation Lab, it partners with young people to co-create inclusive digital products and services that improve their lives. Its multidisciplinary team combines youth-driven design with adolescent health, climate, livelihoods, digital product design, behavioural science and epidemiology. Based in Rwanda and the USA, YLabs has worked in 18 countries on projects in three focus areas: optimum health and wellness, improved economic opportunity and increased climate resilience.

Job overview

YLabs is seeking a Safeguarding Consultant to ensure that its safeguarding system meets recognised standards and that its own team can run it without ongoing external support. The consultancy has four objectives:

• Assess current safeguarding practice against the Keeping Children Safe International Child Safeguarding Standards, major donor requirements and the laws of YLabs’ 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 training and build internal capacity so that YLabs staff can deliver and maintain the system.

Duties and responsibilities

Phase 1: Baseline (weeks 1 to 3)

• Review existing policies, protocols, training materials, contracts and the internal responsibility map.
• Interview Operations, Programs, the Global Safeguarding Lead, Impact and project teams.
• Score current practice against 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 a priorities workplan for Phase 2.

Phase 2: Build (weeks 4 to 11)

• Roles and staffing: review the 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 the global policy suite (safeguarding, child protection, code of conduct, data protection, ethical images, risk assessment templates and matrices), identify gaps and revise, including what an AI policy should cover; build a requirements matrix showing how YLabs policy meets industry standards and donor requirements.
• Safe recruitment: reference check template with safeguarding questions, interview questions, self-declaration form, and validation of the pre-fieldwork clearance checklist.
• Fieldwork: templates for the project safeguarding protocol, risk assessment and go/no-go decision, and a practical approach to daily field monitoring, including 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 the core curriculum and project briefings, revise materials, design role-based training for Operations, 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 (weeks 1 to 3)

• Inception note and agreed workplan (week 1).
• Assessment of the gaps.
• Deep Listening: review of current safeguarding tools, processes and policies to identify policy or implementation gaps across the whole set-up and field sprint processes.

Phase 2 (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, and 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.
• Deep Listening: review policy and tools through the lens of funder priority countries and flag key implementation considerations; explore and recommend supportive safety measures, including viable insurance options and localised security and health protocols for field researchers; create a system for selecting and evaluating local referral services (clinical, psychosocial, security) in each priority country; help clarify and assign safeguarding roles at Deep Listening project level by country of deployment; add gender and disability inclusion guidance to existing tools.

Phase 3 (weeks 12 to 14)

• Train-the-trainer sessions and handover session.
• Final report with a 12-month roadmap.
• Deep Listening: ensure the recommended training, departmental safeguarding processes and tools are practically adapted so Deep Listening project teams and cluster leads can implement and maintain them independently.

Qualifications and experience

YLabs is looking for a practitioner who has built safeguarding systems for organisations working directly with children and youth in sub-Saharan Africa.

Essential

• At least 7 years of safeguarding experience in international development or humanitarian settings, with a focus on children and youth.
• Experience designing safeguarding policies, systems and tools for small or mid-sized organisations.
• Working knowledge of Keeping Children Safe, good practice and major donor requirements.
• Experience with safe recruitment practices.
• Proven ability to design and deliver training, including train-the-trainer.

Desirable

• Experience in YLabs’ fieldwork countries, ideally Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique and Nigeria.
• Experience in research or data-collection settings, including research ethics and IRB processes.
• Knowledge of data protection in safeguarding.

How to apply

Apply online: Apply for the Safeguarding Consultant position

The online application asks for a CV, short answers on safeguarding experience, your estimated rate or total fee, and a one-page response on how you would approach the assignment.

Closing date: 10 November 2026, 09:00 CAT. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis, and YLabs hopes to start the work by the end of November or early December. All applicants will be told the status of their application once the hiring process begins.

Equal opportunities and safeguarding

All YLabs offers are conditional on a satisfactory background check and criminal record clearance. YLabs is committed to equity, justice and belonging at work, and encourages applications from people of all cultures, races, educational backgrounds, socio-economic classes, sexual orientations, ages, genders and physical abilities.

Applications go directly to the employer, not to Malawi24.

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