DDP donors, partners, grantees, consultants, and other stakeholders who experience undesirable behaviour from DDP employees or representatives are invited to report this behaviour as per the Hivos External Complaints Procedure or the Hivos Whistleblowing Procedure.
The Hivos External Complaints Procedure is designed to deal with undesirable behaviour—including (sexual) harassment, bullying and retaliatory actions—by Hivos and DDP employees, implementing organisations, and related service providers and their employees.
If you do not want Hivos to know about your complaint, you can use the Whistleblowing Procedure, which is designed for anonymous reporting.
File a Complaint
To file a complaint, please email your complaint to your DDP or Hivos contact, copying it to complaints@hivos.org. If you do not have or cannot use your contact at DDP or Hivos, or if you wish to make a general complaint, you can email complaints@hivos.org directly. In your complaint, please include the following information:
- Description of complaint.
- Description of how and when the complaint arose.
- Your name, telephone number and/or email address.
- Your relationship to DDP (e.g., donor, partner, grantee-partner, supplier or other stakeholder).
If the complaint concerns inappropriate behaviour, such as sexual harassment, it will be forwarded to an external confidential counsellor, who will contact you directly. The responsibilities of the confidential counsellor are:
- Checking if the complainant is in need of mental or physical support and, if so, arranging for this.
- Giving advice on how to start a complaints procedure (formally or informally).
- Providing guidance on the complaints procedure.
The Hivos team in charge of reviewing complaints will assess what the proper response should be. In making this assessment, the team will consider whether the undesirable behaviour is severe or pervasive enough to create a work environment that a person would consider intimidating, hostile, or abusive. When assessing whether undesirable behaviour is severe or pervasive, consideration is given to the following factors:
- Frequency
- Severity
- Whether the behaviour was physically and emotionally threatening or humiliating
- The effect on the employee’s psychological well-being
- Whether the individual that is being reported on has more power than the reporting individual
Hivos only accepts complaints submitted within six months of the event’s occurrence. Within two weeks, you will receive written confirmation of receipt, and information about the next steps. If you are not satisfied with the response, you may resubmit the complaint to the head of the department concerned, copying in complaints@hivos.org. If you are still not satisfied, you may escalate the matter to higher Hivos management levels. If the issue cannot be resolved by Hivos, you can turn to the Partos Complaints Committee.
All personal details of the complainant are handled and recorded with care and confidentiality, according to Dutch privacy laws.
Whistleblowing Procedure
Hivos set up the Hivos Whistleblowing Procedure to deal with anonymous reports of fraud, corruption, and other integrity issues regarding Hivos, Hivos employees, our implementing organisations, consultants, and related service providers and their employees. The whistleblowing procedure is meant to address cases of misconduct that you have witnessed or have certain knowledge of, but which may not personally affect you. You may also use the Hivos whistleblowing procedure if you are personally affected but wish to stay anonymous. In this case, an external confidential counsellor will contact you. Hivos makes use of an independent external service, AAB (former SeeHearSpeakUp), which lets you report your concerns anonymously.
How to report? Reporting can be done in three ways:
- Calling AAB (former SeeHearSpeakUp).
- Using the online reporting tool.
- Emailing report@seehearspeakup.co.uk.