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.
Our team
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.
Co-founder and Director
Megan Denise Smith
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)
Co-founder and Director
Alexandra Valério
Alexandra is a safeguarding, PSEAH and child protection specialist with more than 13 years of international experience across humanitarian and development settings. Her work focuses on turning safeguarding commitments into systems and practices that work in the environments where people may be exposed to harm.
She has worked from frontline operations to global headquarters, combining organisational safeguarding and PSEAH with child protection, protection mainstreaming and operational risk mitigation. Her experience includes assessing safeguarding risks across programmes and services; strengthening policies, procedures, reporting and referral systems; supporting and establishing victim/survivor-centred responses; and designing practical training and implementation approaches for staff, managers and focal points.
Alexandra has held global safeguarding and PSEAH roles with IOM, where she has contributed to organisational policy and implementation, supported country operations and PSEAH practitioners globally, and worked to translate institutional standards into practical guidance, capacity building and tools. Her work has included child safeguarding implementation, child-sensitive approaches to SEA response, safeguarding assessments and risk mitigation across operational settings.
Earlier in her career, she worked extensively in child protection and protection programming, including in Bangladesh, Mozambique, Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Her experience ranges from child protection case management and supervision to safety audits, protection mainstreaming, community-based referral and feedback mechanisms, and humanitarian coordination.
Across these roles, a consistent focus of her work has been identifying where policies and systems meet operational reality: where risks emerge, where people may fall through gaps, and what organisations can practically change to make their work safer.
Key areas
Safeguarding systems and implementation · PSEAH · Child safeguarding and child protection · Safeguarding risk and safer programming · Protection mainstreaming · Training and capacity strengthening · Survivor-centred response · Organisational assessments
Learning Design Lead
Ola (Aleksandra) Perczynska
Aleksandra is a protection, GBV and disability inclusion specialist with thirteen years of experience in fragile and conflict-affected settings, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Poland, Ukraine and the occupied Palestinian territories. Her work turns technical standards into contextualised tools people can use: curricula, training packages, guidance notes and standard operating procedures, shaped by intersectional, gender-transformative approaches.
She designs learning for every level, from frontline facilitators to partner organisations. For UNFPA Afghanistan she built a contextualised disability inclusion training package, with curriculum, assessment tools and e-learning, and piloted it with 16 partners in a cascading model. Her training of trainers on psychological first aid, psychosocial support and victim/survivor-centred principles raised post-training competency scores by an average of 38%. In Nepal she designed participatory curricula on safe learning environments, school-related gender-based violence and gender-transformative programmes for adolescent girls and boys.
At CARE Poland she led a technical unit supporting 12 partner organisations across Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, including women-led, LGBTQ+ and Roma-led groups, and served as Acting Safeguarding Advisor. Her research includes studies with refugee adolescents and domestic workers, and a children’s disability assessment close to the front line in Ukraine.
She founded Her Turn, an education and empowerment programme for rural adolescent girls in Nepal that continues under local leadership, and later designed a five-year programme there reaching 8,500 married, out-of-school adolescent girls. She holds an MA in Social Sciences from Lancaster University.
Key areas
Learning design and training of trainers · GBV · Protection · MHPSS · Disability inclusion · Participatory research · Gender-transformative programming