Our standards and commitments

Villagers from Sharonkhola Upazila in the Khulna district, a cyclone affected area. Our partner Prodipan supports a tree plantation project which helps protect the village from natural disasters [Claire Goudsmit]

We are committed to ensuring accountability to our stakeholders and to delivering quality programmes guided by agreed codes and standards. To this end, we have an Accountability Framework, consisting of eight commitments we strive to uphold and that guide all our international work.

Their purpose is to help us increase the quality, effectiveness and impact of our international work, and comply with the HAP Principles of Accountability. We are committed to taking account of the views, needs and capacities of our partners and the people in the poor communities we support so that the quality and effectiveness of our work is strengthened. Indeed, we strive to hold ourselves to account to all our stakeholders - including supporters and donors - in the delivery of these commitments.

Commitment 1 – Vision, Mission and Values (VMV)

We are committed to upholding our VMV through our staff, our relationships with partners and the communities we work with, and through all our international programme work. We are committed to standing alongside the poor and marginalised in solidarity and to increasing awareness and understanding of underlying causes of poverty.

The new Strategic Framework ‘Just One World’ was signed off by our board in June 2010 and provides clarity, direction, structure and coherence for our work over the period 2010-2020. It also includes a refined Vision-Mission-Values (VMV) statement as well as setting out our ten-year aims with respect to our four-fold mission: power and influence; sustainable development; peace and security; and our Catholic Community in England and Wales.

Teams throughout CAFOD have developed three-year rolling plans which are closely aligned to the Strategic Framework.

By April 2011: We will develop mechanisms to track and monitor progress against the three-year rolling plans and report the impact that our work has made.

Commitment 2 - Partners and the poor communities we work with

We are committed to working in partnership for our work in international development, humanitarian response, advocacy and education. We are committed to quality, transparency, participation, openness and equality in our relationship with partners, and to promote good partnership and accountability within the communities we serve.

The CAFOD Project Cycle Management (PCM) Handbook has been reviewed and revised to incorporate international standards, approaches and practices for accountability to the communities we work with, and other stakeholders.

By April 2011: As CAFOD has grown in size and complexity, this has been accompanied by a need to balance the commitment to improve standards of accountability and protection with a partnership approach, which respects the independence and autonomy of partners. We will, by April 2011, identify a set of agreed ‘Strategic Partners’ with whom we will work closely in priority areas, including developing plans for achieving minimum standards of accountability and safeguarding children.

Commitment 3 – Quality programmes

Through long-term partnership with local organisations and communities, we support their work to build a better world for people living in extreme poverty. We maximise our impact on poverty by focusing on areas of work where we, and our partners, have particular expertise – such as creating an environment where people can make a living sustainably, combating HIV and AIDS, environmental justice and peace-building.

In emergency situations, we provide immediate relief as well as supporting long-term recovery programmes to rebuild lives. Our international work is underpinned and guided by international codes and standards.

In September 2009, we were successfully certified against the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership International (HAP) accountability and quality management standard. This demonstrates our commitment to strengthening our accountability and supports us to continually improve our practices throughout our international development and humanitarian programme work.

By April 2011: We will develop learning documents on our experience of the livelihoods approach, disaster risk reduction and HIV and AIDS, which will be used to feed in to improved programme implementation.

Commitment 4 - Stewardship, governance and finance

We are committed to being good stewards of all resources entrusted to us, openly accountable for our work, and professional in managing our resources.

Although our income has held up remarkably well since the beginning of the credit crunch, we remain aware of the growing economic pressures on individuals and on the public finances and the potential for this to impact on the level of our funding. To ensure we are in good shape for the coming years, during 2009/10 the trustees undertook a review and identified savings in CAFOD staff posts and activity costs to be implemented from April 2010. Whilst this regrettably involved making some redundancies, the trustees believe this was necessary to protect the budgets we have for international partner grants.

We have also recently carried out a governance review in which our board reviewed and revised the role of its sub-committees, namely: Human Resources; Finance and internal Audit; International Programme Committee (IPC). We are proud that for the first time we have a trustee representative from our Southern partners.

In early 2010, CAFOD completed the construction of Romero House, moving in May 2010 from its home for the last 25 years in Stockwell to a new headquarters, developed in partnership with the Archdiocese of Southwark at a site next to St George’s Cathedral. This development was completed on time and on budget, achieved an excellent rating for environmental performance and will provide the base for our global programme for the years to come.

By April 2011: Looking ahead in the longer term, we aim to continue to build our supporter base in the Catholic Community in England and Wales, as well as considerably increase institutional funding to expand particular programmes and increase their impact. To contribute to this by April 2011 we aim to develop increasing links between supporter communities at home and the communities we work with in the South and also develop our competence across CAFOD in managing larger scale and complex funded programmes.

Commitment 5 - Safeguarding and protection

We are committed to recognising the personal dignity and rights of all people we work with, especially vulnerable groups. We have a particular concern to ensure children and young people are safeguarded and recognise we have a special duty of care and respect towards them. This commitment also extends to safeguarding the vulnerable adults we work with.

In support of our commitment to safeguarding and protection, we have adopted a Code of Behaviour for all our staff, volunteers and consultants, which has been integrated into induction and training programmes. We have also carried out a review and strengthening of CAFOD policies and procedures to protect children and young people.

In order to encourage and assist partners with the development and implementation of their own policies for safeguarding, we have developed useful tools to support capacity building activities.

By April 2011: We will update our recruitment processes to take account of recent changes to safeguarding authority arrangements (ISA-registration for the Vetting and Barring Scheme).
We will work to promote safeguarding and protection with our partners, working with strategic partners to assist in the development of their policies and strengthening their response and protection concerns.

Commitment 6 - Supporters, communities and donors

We are committed to two-way communications with our supporters, and hearing their feedback – both positive and negative. We engage our supporters as partners in building mutually respectful development links with communities in the global south.

We welcome feedback and have established a feedback management policy and system for our stakeholders in the UK to ensure that we manage and respond to feedback effectively and promptly. We consider hearing positive and negative feedback an important element to our learning in order that we make on-going improvements to the way we work.

By April 2011: We will develop the feedback management system reporting functionality to enable feedback to inform management decision making around planning, strategy development and allocation of resources.

We are seeking to build stronger links between our supporters and our international programmes through our ‘Connect2’ scheme which provides opportunities for parish communities and groups to enter into a relationship with one of our overseas partners to learn more about the impact of their support.

Commitment 7 – Staff

We are committed to fair recruitment, upholding professional standards and providing management support to all staff. We are committed to recognising good practice and to supporting professional development and learning. We strive to do all that we reasonably can do to ensure our staff and volunteers are secure and protected as they go about their work.

In October 2009, we were successfully verified compliant under People In Aid Code of Good Practice which is an internationally recognised management tool that will help us enhance the quality of our human resource management.

By April 2011: We aim to maintain our certification under People in Aid Code of Good Practice as a way of strengthening our internal mechanisms for handling complaints.

Commitment 8 – To learn from and share our experiences

We are committed to developing and integrating a strong learning dimension into all our ways of working, to bringing our learning and planning into a more dynamic relationship with each other and to using a variety of methodologies, to improve the quality of our work and its impact.

We have conducted a review of the evaluation and review policy in order to support a greater understanding of our impact and to ensure learning from international programmes.

By April 2011: The implementation of the new evaluation and review policy will ensure that learning from international programmes informs management decisions around planning, strategy development and allocation of resources, as well as promoting learning across international programmes. As part of this commitment, all external evaluations of our programme work will be shared through our website (while exercising due care for the safety of our staff and partners) in order to build and maintain confidence in our stewardship, value for money and impact. We welcome dialogue and feedback from others in order to enhance our programme quality and effectiveness.

If you would like further information about our commitment to accountability and HAP then please email accountability@cafod.org.uk

CAFOD’s Accountability work plan implementation report: Jan – Dec 2009 provides further details of objectives, achievements, challenges and lessons learned relating to CAFOD accountability work.

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