Safeguarding Women and Girls from GBVH in PIDG Investments and Operations

PIDG is committed to meeting the Sustainable Development Goals and in particular, SDG5: Gender Equality. We seek investment which will empower women and transform women’s lives. We screen all projects against the PIDG Gender Ambition Framework to see how a project can achieve gender ambition across five areas: governance, workforce, products and services, supply chain or in the local communities.

But we do not do this in isolation. We aim to ensure that we can deliver on our commitments to improve lives by seeking to ensure that we protect these lives.

In 2019 we developed the PIDG Social Policy which sets out our commitment to Gender Equality. In 2020, we have developed the PIDG Safeguarding Policy which sets out our commitments for safeguarding women and girls on our portfolio projects and in the communities in which the projects operate, against Gender based violence and Harassment (GBVH). We seek to ensure a work environment that is free of sexual harassment, intimidation, exploitation or abuse, and our aim is to guarantee that the communities are free from any form of project related intimidation, exploitation, violence or abuse.

PIDG HSES has rolled out a GBVH training programme across all our companies to raise awareness about this important topic. The objectives of the training is to be able to help our project companies identify, assess and manage GBVH risk across the portfolio projects and to understand what tools and resources there are available to support them in this process, both internally within PIDG and externally.

As part of the GBVH safeguarding tools we have developed the PIDG HSES Safeguarding Rules – a set of 10 rules with easy to remember icons, established to provide implementable mechanisms to mitigate against GBVH, modern slavery and child labour safeguarding risks within portfolio projects.