Strategic push: Ensuring safety and dignity
Ensuring safety and dignity drives everything DRC does to protect displaced people
The cycle of harm continues long after people flee their homes. As they try to reach safety, they face movement restrictions and extortion because they lack documentation.
When they arrive at displacement sites, the infrastructure for clean water and electricity is often non-existent; and survivors of gender-based violence face ongoing risks in crowded sites that lack privacy and lighting near latrines. In displacement, safety and dignity are scarce, and risks are everywhere.
Reducing protection risks will guide everything we do so that displaced people can look to a hopeful future and build it. When we grasp the protection risks people face, we can respond effectively:
- by building shelters that allow families to live in dignity; by removing unexploded ordnance so that people can travel safely;
- by providing mental health and psychosocial support to survivors of sexual violence so that they can heal;
- and by ensuring that children affected by displacement can go to school instead of being forced into marriage or work.
This is how DRC can help break the cycle of harm, create stability, and build pathways to safety and dignity for displaced people.
We will push:
Through our entire organisation:
DRC is a displacement organisation with protection at our core. This means we will elevate the reduction of protection risks to a core management responsibility across the organisation. This will make DRC a stronger advocate for protection at country and global
levels, anchor protection risks reduction as imperative for staff, and become a key factor in operational decision making. This strategic shift will lead to a DRC culture in which protection becomes a core operational and leadership responsibility.
Through our programme offering:
Holistically combining the strengths of our sectors, we will bring together our expertise to more effectively design activities that reduce protection risks across the entire range of our programming so it becomes a shared responsibility among staff and partners.
Through our data, collaborations, and influence:
We will unify our protection monitoring and analysis system across DRC to ensure more consistent identification of protection risks, so we further enhance the quality and protection impact of our assistance, as well as provide evidence-based advocacy to help shape policies and funding. Reinforcing local leadership and capacity sharing with partners will be essential to achieve this.
We lost our [National ID] during the earthquake when our house collapsed. Without these documents, we would have been unable to access many essential services. This made our situation even more difficult, as we were already struggling with loss, injuries, and displacement but also facing barriers to receiving the help we urgently needed” – a survivor of the 2025 earthquake in Afghanistan who was pregnant. DRC supported her and her family to obtain documents to access assistance and healthcare.
DRC Afghanistan
We will track how the protection risks that people face shape our actions, advocacy, and internal practices, alongside tracking reductions in harm, improved perceptions of safety, and shifts in donor policy.
Protecting people from violence, coercion and deprivation is at the core of DRC’s programming, and we will push further ensuring safety and dignity becomes DRC's strategic imperative driving everything we do.
