British charity Oxfam yesterday unveiled an action plan to tackle sexual misconduct following the “stain” of a prostitution scandal but the man at the centre of the allegations denied organising charges.
The aid group said it would create an independent commission which will have the power to access records and interview staff in a bid to stamp out abuse and impose stricter controls on employees.
“We are going to create a vetting system,” Winnie Byanyima, executive director of Oxfam International, told the BBC.
“I’m really inviting anyone who has been a victim of abuse by anyone in our organisation to come forward.”
Oxfam will triple funding to more than $1mn to improve safeguarding, while also doubling the number of staff in this area and increasing investment in gender training.
The new plan comes a week after revelations that Oxfam staff used prostitutes while working in Haiti following a devastating 2010 earthquake and a wave of subsequent allegations of sexual misconduct.
The charity’s deputy chief executive Penny Lawrence has resigned and three Oxfam global ambassadors including South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu have quit their roles as a result of the scandal.
“What happened in Haiti and afterwards is a stain on Oxfam that will shame us for years, and rightly so,” Byanyima said, adding: “From the bottom of my heart I am asking for forgiveness.”
Oxfam fired four staff members for gross misconduct and allowed three others to resign following an internal inquiry into what happened in Haiti in 2011.
But Roland van Hauwermeiren, Oxfam’s director in Haiti at the time and one of the three who resigned from the charity, dismissed the allegations.
“I have never been into a brothel, a nightclub or a bar in that country,” the 68-year-old Belgian national said in a four-page letter published on the website of Belgian VTM News.
“There were numerous men and women who tried to get into my house with all sorts of excuses to demand money, work, or to offer sexual services. But I never gave into these advances,” he said.
The charity has denied covering up the Haiti affair, which has prompted a drop in donations and led the government to threaten to cut funds to organisations which try to hide sex scandals.
The charity admitted on Thursday it rehired one of those sacked in Haiti just months later and is now checking whether any complaints were subsequently made.
Gurpreet Singh worked as a consultant in Ethiopia from October to December 2011, a decision Oxfam said was “a serious error and should never have happened”. The charity yesterday said it was also investigating allegations of sexual misconduct at a hotel in the Philippines after a destructive typhoon in 2013.
Oxfam’s regional director for Asia Lan Mercado earlier this week told the BBC she was aware of cases of sexual abuse involving staff in Bangladesh, Nepal and the Philippines between 2009 and 2013.
Related Story