The World Health Organization is betting bad headlines can lead to good news.
In recent months, the media reported on several WHO employees being dismissed for sexual misconduct. But rather than lament the headlines, the WHO welcomes them. The public scrutiny, it says, sends a strong signal that misconduct is not accepted. By being open about the dismissals, the WHO hopes to create a culture of transparency, motivating victims to speak up, and deterring any would-be perpetrators.
If this approach works, the WHO case could serve as both cautionary tale and useful case study.
“All organizations are affected by [sexual misconduct],” Dr. Gaya Gamhewage, the WHO's director in charge of sexual misconduct prevention and response told me in Geneva. “We’ve seen how much this affects and harms people. It’s an issue of our time. But it can also make [companies] lose profits because there is capital to be lost—human and social capital.”
Data shows the problem is indeed widespread. A 2019 survey showed that one-third of United Nations employees said they had experienced sexual misconduct of some kind. And the International Labour Organization found that almost 23% of employed people globally have experienced violence or harassment at work, including but not exclusively sexual in nature.
At the WHO, the reckoning started with investigative reporting on sexual abuse by workers active during the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told me. As The New Humanitarian and Reuters revealed at the time, at least 30 WHO workers were involved in multiple incidents of sexual abuse, affecting at least 51 women. "To serve the people we serve, safety is number one," Ghebreyesus said. That the health organization failed on that very basic task was a wake-up call, he noted.
Even though the WHO was neck-deep in the COVID crisis at the time, Ghebreyesus realized sexual misconduct posed a danger to the organization, he told me. To continue failing on this front would “be close to Einstein’s definition of madness, doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result,” he said.
So the organization decided to drastically reform its response to sexual misconduct, starting with a mea culpa and a commitment: “We very much accept our organization didn’t do as much to prevent [sexual misconduct] from happening [in the past]," Gamhewage, whose appointment came after the investigation, said. “But we’re committing to preventing this from happening going forward.”
The commitment included financial, process, and human resources elements: a $25 million annual budget for an office of sexual harassment prevention and a survivor assistance fund, along with 350 full- or part-time roles—at least one in each of its dozens of country offices—to act as focal points. And at the top, Ghebreyesus set aside two hours each week to discuss progress with Gamhewage and others.
They also hired an external agency to serve for further investigation, which confirmed that “sexual abuse was rampant, and the processes and culture were problematic,” Ghebreyesus said.
He believes using external resources to conduct the review was key: “An internal process would not have shown us the real problem,” he said.
To change the “problematic” culture, a clear break with the past was needed. The WHO put into place a new investigation system with 18 researchers and, crucially, a deadline for reaching conclusions. “Notoriously, there was no length before,” Gamhewage said. Going forward, the limit was set at 120 days to reach an initial verdict, and 60-80 days for appeals.
Perhaps the most important new element, though, is radical transparency. Any employee can now see sanctions leveled for sexual misconduct, including the country and seniority of the perpetrators involved. This is done anonymously except in the case of dismissals when the names of those responsible are made public—leading to several high-profile news stories in the past months.
This is why the organization doesn’t see the recent headlines as bad news, but as part of a deliberate process designed to foster better outcomes. And if the WHO approach works, Gamhewage believes, it could work elsewhere too. “The UN is a microcosm of society,” she said. “We can’t eradicate or eliminate [sexual harassment], but we can reduce it. It is about power differentials. That’s what we’re trying to address.”
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Peter Vanham
Executive Editor, Fortune
peter.vanham@fortune.com
