Beyond Misconduct: What the MSF Chad Case Reveals About the Limits of Safeguarding

When safeguarding failures become public, organisations often respond in familiar ways.

Investigations are launched. Perpetrators are dismissed. Reporting mechanisms are strengthened. Additional training is introduced. New policies are developed.

These responses matter. They can help address harm, support survivors, and demonstrate accountability.

Yet they also raise a difficult question.

If safeguarding systems are functioning effectively, why do organisations so often discover exploitation only after it has become widespread?

The recent findings from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in eastern Chad bring this question into sharp focus. Following allegations raised by Sudanese refugee women, investigations identified fifty-nine allegations of misconduct involving sexual harassment, exploitation, and abuse across multiple categories of staff, contractors, and suppliers. Eighteen individuals were dismissed and barred from future employment.

Much of the public discussion has understandably focused on the actions of those responsible.

But safeguarding is not only about perpetrators.

It is also about systems.

And this case reveals something important about the limits of how safeguarding is often understood across the humanitarian sector.

The Problem with Viewing Safeguarding Through Misconduct Alone

Many safeguarding frameworks continue to be organised around a relatively narrow set of questions:

Who caused harm?

How can incidents be reported?

What disciplinary action should follow?

How can survivors be supported?

These are necessary questions.

They are not sufficient ones.

When dozens of allegations emerge across multiple organisational roles and relationships, the issue extends beyond individual misconduct. The pattern points towards organisational conditions that enabled exploitation to occur, remain hidden, or become normalised over time.

The issue is not whether disciplinary action should be taken.

The issue is why the conditions for abuse existed in the first place.

Safeguarding often becomes strongest at the point of response and weakest at the point of prevention.

This matters because organisations frequently measure safeguarding maturity through policies, reporting channels, investigations, and training. Far less attention is given to how power is organised, exercised, and experienced within everyday operational systems.

Yet it is power that often determines where safeguarding risks emerge.

The Question Is Not Vulnerability. It Is Dependency.

Humanitarian safeguarding discourse frequently focuses on vulnerability.

People are described as vulnerable because they are displaced, poor, young, disabled, traumatised, or otherwise exposed to risk.

While these realities matter, vulnerability alone does not explain exploitation.

Dependency does.

The reports from Chad describe refugee women who feared speaking out because they worried about losing access to assistance. Some allegations involved jobs, resources, or opportunities being exchanged for sex. Others involved individuals whose access to support was shaped by people exercising authority over them.

These dynamics are not incidental.

They sit at the heart of safeguarding risk.

A dependency lens asks a different question from a vulnerability lens.

Instead of asking who is vulnerable, it asks:

Who controls access to resources, opportunities, information, protection, or services that others need?

In humanitarian contexts, this question is unavoidable.

Aid workers, managers, contractors, security personnel, and organisational representatives often exercise significant influence over access to resources that people require for survival. This creates relationships characterised by profound asymmetries of power.

Under such conditions, exploitation cannot be understood solely as a matter of individual behaviour.

It must also be understood as a governance issue.

Why Training Cannot Solve Structural Problems

One striking aspect of the reporting is the acknowledgement that previous efforts to prevent abuse, including training and awareness activities, did not have lasting effects.

This finding deserves attention.

Across CTDC's work, what we see repeatedly is an assumption that safeguarding failures result primarily from knowledge gaps. If people better understand policies, reporting procedures, or behavioural expectations, harm will be reduced.

Knowledge matters.

But knowledge does not eliminate structural incentives.

A staff member may understand safeguarding policies while continuing to abuse their authority. A refugee may understand reporting mechanisms while remaining unwilling to report because the personal risks are too high.

People often know what is happening.

The question is whether organisational conditions make it possible to challenge it safely.

This is why safeguarding cannot be reduced to awareness raising. It requires attention to governance, accountability, supervision, organisational culture, resource distribution, and power itself.

The Limits of a Survivor-Centred Response

The MSF statement appropriately emphasises a survivor-centred approach.

Over recent years, survivor-centred practice has helped shift safeguarding away from institutional self-protection and towards the needs, dignity, and agency of those affected.

This has been an important development.

Yet survivor-centred approaches can sometimes obscure another question: what responsibilities do institutions hold before harm occurs?

Much safeguarding practice focuses on what organisations should do once abuse has been disclosed.

How should survivors be supported?

How should confidentiality be maintained?

How should investigations be conducted?

These questions matter.

But they begin after harm has already taken place.

A prevention-oriented safeguarding framework asks something different.

How were organisational systems structured in ways that made exploitation possible?

This is not a criticism of survivor-centred practice.

It is an argument for complementing it with a stronger analysis of power, governance, and institutional responsibility.

Humanitarian Crisis Does Not Suspend Power

Humanitarian organisations work in exceptionally difficult environments.

Conflict, displacement, insecurity, resource shortages, and operational pressures create genuine challenges for safeguarding practice.

Yet crisis does not reduce the importance of power.

It often intensifies it.

Displacement increases dependency. Scarcity increases competition for resources. Uncertainty reduces people's ability to challenge authority. Humanitarian actors frequently become gatekeepers to services, information, employment, mobility, and protection.

In these contexts, safeguarding cannot be separated from broader questions of humanitarian governance.

The issue is not simply how organisations respond to abuse.

The issue is how humanitarian systems distribute power and accountability in the first place.

Without confronting these dynamics, organisations risk treating safeguarding failures as isolated incidents rather than recurring features of unequal systems.

Beyond Compliance

One of the most persistent assumptions in safeguarding is that stronger compliance leads to safer organisations.

Certainly, policies, investigations, reporting channels, and disciplinary procedures are necessary.

But compliance alone cannot resolve structural inequalities.

An organisation may comply fully with safeguarding requirements while continuing to operate within systems that generate dependency, concentrate authority, and discourage challenge.

The question is therefore not only whether organisations have safeguarding mechanisms.

It is whether those mechanisms meaningfully alter relationships of power.

This is where a justice-oriented approach to safeguarding differs from a compliance-oriented one.

The central concern is not simply whether procedures were followed.

It is whether organisations are structured in ways that make exploitation more difficult, more visible, and more accountable.

What Prevention Actually Requires

The Chad case should not be understood simply as a story about misconduct.

Nor should it be understood solely as evidence that investigations work.

It reveals something more uncomfortable.

Many organisations have become better at responding to safeguarding failures than they are at preventing the conditions that produce them.

Prevention requires more than reporting channels. More than training. More than disciplinary action.

It requires organisations to examine how authority is exercised, how dependency is created, whose voices are heard, who can safely challenge decisions, and where accountability ultimately sits.

Because safeguarding is not only about identifying harmful behaviour.

It is about understanding the systems, relationships, and power structures within which that behaviour becomes possible.

Until safeguarding is approached in these terms, organisations will continue to find themselves investigating harms they believed they had already prevented.