In recent days, allegations have emerged of sexual harassment related to an external trainer used by CiFAR in one of our programmes in 2017-2018. We take these allegations very seriously and are committed to ensuring that we fully give effect to our zero tolerance policy on harassment and discrimination.
In light of and as a response to this, and our responsibility to ensure that persons with whom we work are protected at all times during their work with us from sexual harassment or other forms of discrimination, we have decided to undertake an audit of our safeguarding systems.
This audit will have two parts. Firstly, we will undertake an assessment of our current practices. We will reach out to our past participants, to understand whether they were subject to harassment or discrimination during out trainings, if and why they did not feel they could report it to us, and what we could change in our systems to encourage reporting in the future. Following this, we will conduct a review of current anti-harassment and discrimination policies and procedures against the results of the assessment, with a view to strengthening the measures we have in place to ensure that all our participants and collaborators are protected to the full extent possible during our work.
The results of this will result in an updated anti-harassment and anti-discrimination policy and process, which will be published on our website. We aim to complete this by the end of 2020.
If you would like more information on this process, you can get in touch with us by email at info@cifar.eu