Who We Are
Safeguarding Practice International is deliberately small. Each engagement is staffed according to what the work requires, drawing on a network of specialists, and always led by a named principal consultant who is your point of contact throughout.
Everyone who works under Safeguarding Practice International is a senior practitioner in gender-based violence, child protection or PSEAH. We have designed programmes and evaluated them, built and run multi-donor portfolios, and sat in the coordination structures where standards get agreed and then have to be applied. We have done this in the field, at headquarters, and in the space between the two, across humanitarian, development and peace and security settings.
Megan Denise Smith
Co-founder and Director
Megan is a safeguarding and gender-based violence specialist with over a decade of experience across UN agencies and NGOs, at headquarters and in Bangladesh, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Rwanda, Tunisia, Ukraine and the UK. Her work sits where policy meets practice: the operating models, governance arrangements and systems through which institutions respond when someone is harmed, and whether those systems hold up under pressure.
She spent five years in the Rohingya refugee response in Cox's Bazar, designing and running IOM's GBV programming on a USD 2M multi-donor portfolio and rising to lead the Protection Unit: 61 staff, 83 volunteers and three implementing partners across protection, GBV, child protection, counter-trafficking and research. She established ten women and girls' safe spaces and a safe shelter during an L3 emergency, built the cost structures and staffing models behind them, and secured the multi-donor funding that sustained them across successive cycles. She helped establish and then co-chaired the inter-agency PSEA Network for Cox's Bazar, a shared mechanism through which agencies pooled capacity and agreed common standards.
At headquarters she designs victim/survivor-centred case management systems and has authored institutional guidance now in use across a global organisation. For the OSCE she assessed the investigative interviewing competency of 77 professionals from 37 countries alongside the Italian Carabinieri. She has led multi-country assessments for UNFPA across the Caribbean and facilitated peer learning for the Centre of Competence on Humanitarian Negotiation.
She is co-editor of Disrupting Anti-Trafficking Norms (Bristol University Press, 2026), holds an MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics, and is a doctoral researcher in Political and Social Sciences at Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
Key areas: GBV, child protection, PSEAH, case management, human trafficking, participatory and community-led methods (research and programme design)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/megandenisesmith/
Website: megandenisesmith.com