Sport is global.
Safeguarding happens locally.
That tension sits at the heart of one of the biggest challenges facing the safe sport movement.
Across countries, sports and communities, there is increasing agreement around the need to protect people from harm, uphold dignity, strengthen accountability and create environments where athletes and participants feel safe.
But the way those principles are understood, communicated and implemented cannot always look identical everywhere.
Different countries have different legal systems.
Different sports have different structures.
Different communities understand authority, trust, family, leadership and disclosure in different ways.
Resources vary.
Language varies.
Reporting mechanisms vary.
And the people expected to rely on safeguarding systems may have very different experiences of institutions, power and protection.
So the challenge is not simply to create global safeguarding standards.
It is to make sure those standards can be translated into locally meaningful, trusted and workable practice.
Global ambition does not require global uniformity
There are some principles that should not depend on geography.
People should be protected from abuse, exploitation, violence and discrimination.
Athletes should be treated with dignity and respect.
Children and adults at risk should have appropriate safeguards around them.
People should have ways to raise concerns.
Organisations should respond appropriately when harm occurs.
Leaders should be accountable.
And those affected should be supported.
These are not optional ideas.
They sit at the heart of rights-based safeguarding.
But agreement around principles does not mean every safeguarding system needs to look the same.
A reporting process that works well in one sporting environment may be inaccessible or mistrusted in another.
A model built around highly formal organisational structures may not translate easily into settings where sport is delivered through community networks, volunteers or informal leadership.
Language used in one country may not carry the same meaning somewhere else.
Even something as simple as the question:
“Who would you tell if something happened?”
may produce very different answers depending on culture, age, gender, social position and local relationships.
Effective safeguarding therefore requires more than exporting models.
It requires understanding context.
SafeSport26 brought this conversation into focus
This question came through strongly during SafeSport26 in Cape Town.
The conference brought together practitioners, researchers, leaders and organisations from across the global safe sport community, with particularly strong participation and leadership from Africa and the Global South.
Across the programme, speakers repeatedly challenged the idea that safeguarding knowledge should flow in only one direction.
Safe sport is not something developed in one part of the world and then delivered elsewhere.
It is strengthened when knowledge, experience and leadership move between regions.
When locally developed approaches are recognised.
When communities are treated as partners rather than recipients.
And when those closest to the sporting environment help shape the solutions.
One SafeSport26 reflection captured the balance well:
“Safeguarding needs cultural translation, not cultural compromise.”
That distinction matters.
Culture should inform safeguarding — not excuse harm
Culture affects safeguarding.
It shapes relationships.
It influences expectations around authority.
It affects how people communicate.
It can influence who somebody trusts.
It may shape how comfortable a person feels challenging a coach, elder or leader.
It may affect whether something is described openly, indirectly or not at all.
Ignoring those realities can make safeguarding systems ineffective.
But cultural context should never be used to justify harmful behaviour.
There is a difference between adapting the way safeguarding is communicated and adapting the rights safeguarding exists to protect.
Respecting culture does not mean accepting abuse.
Understanding local power structures does not mean refusing to challenge them.
Working sensitively within communities does not mean lowering expectations around dignity, safety or protection from harm.
The task is more demanding than that.
It is to understand context while remaining clear about fundamental rights.
Listen before designing
One of the most practical implications of locally led safeguarding is simple:
listen first.
Before designing a policy, reporting pathway or educational programme, organisations need to understand the environment in which it will operate.
Who do participants trust?
How are concerns currently raised?
What language makes sense?
What barriers exist?
Who holds formal power?
Who holds informal influence?
How might age, gender, disability, sexuality, ethnicity or socioeconomic position affect someone’s experience?
What already works?
And what has previously made people reluctant to engage with safeguarding systems?
These are not peripheral questions.
They are part of designing something that people can actually use.
SafeSport26 attendees repeatedly reflected on the importance of trust, participation and locally relevant systems, including the need to involve athletes and communities directly in shaping safeguarding practice.
Local leadership matters
Safeguarding is more sustainable when it is led by people who understand the sporting and cultural environment.
That does not mean local leaders should work in isolation.
Quite the opposite.
Global networks can provide evidence, frameworks, training, expertise and shared standards.
But those resources become more powerful when they support local leadership rather than replace it.
Local practitioners understand things that external organisations may not.
They know where trust sits.
They understand informal systems.
They recognise which messages resonate.
They often know where resistance will emerge.
And they can help translate global principles into approaches that make sense in practice.
This is particularly important when working across the Global South.
Too often, international safeguarding conversations have been shaped primarily by organisations, research and models developed in the Global North.
SafeSport26 challenged that imbalance by creating space for African leadership, locally grounded experience and different ways of understanding safe sport.
That shift matters.
Because global safeguarding becomes stronger when more parts of the world help define what good practice looks like.
Resources and operational capacity cannot be ignored
Context is not only cultural.
It is also practical.
Some organisations have safeguarding departments, specialist staff and established reporting infrastructure.
Others depend on volunteers.
Some have access to legal, clinical and investigative expertise.
Others may operate in environments where external referral options are limited.
Some work within mature regulatory systems.
Others may be building structures almost from scratch.
This means safeguarding expectations need to remain ambitious while also being realistic about how implementation happens.
A policy cannot compensate for a lack of people able to carry it out.
A reporting pathway cannot work if nobody has the capacity to respond.
Training cannot transform practice if participants have no authority to act.
And international standards cannot create impact if organisations lack the resources to operationalise them.
SafeSport26 repeatedly returned to the gap between policy and implementation, including the need for stronger operational capacity, consistent processes and leadership support.
Globally aligned safeguarding therefore has to consider not just what organisations should do, but what they need in order to do it well.
Athlete voice is essential across every context
If safeguarding is going to be locally meaningful, the people experiencing sport need to be part of shaping it.
Athletes understand the environment differently from those governing it.
Children and young people may notice risks adults overlook.
Participants may know which reporting routes feel realistic and which exist only on paper.
People with lived experience may identify unintended barriers that are invisible to those designing systems.
That is why athlete voice needs to go beyond consultation.
The goal should not be to ask people what they think after a system has been designed.
It should be to involve them in shaping the environment from the beginning.
This principle is universal.
How it happens may differ.
Human rights provide the common ground
The strongest global safeguarding frameworks are not based on identical procedures.
They are based on shared principles.
Human rights provide that common ground.
They help us hold onto a consistent ambition even when implementation differs.
Everyone should have the right to participate in sport without violence, abuse, exploitation or discrimination.
Everyone should be treated with dignity.
Everyone should have appropriate ways to seek help.
Everyone should be heard.
And sporting organisations should be accountable for creating environments that protect those rights.
The challenge is then to work with communities, organisations and participants to decide how those principles become real in each context.
That is what globally aligned, locally led safeguarding can look like.
Knowledge needs to flow in every direction
There is another important consequence of this approach.
Global safeguarding cannot only be about transferring expertise from international organisations to local settings.
Learning needs to move in every direction.
A community programme in Kenya may have something to teach an international federation.
A practitioner in South Africa may identify an approach that could improve practice elsewhere.
A safeguarding model developed in Latin America may challenge assumptions built into a European framework.
An athlete-led initiative may expose gaps that researchers or governing bodies have missed.
This kind of exchange strengthens everyone.
It also reflects one of the core ambitions behind SafeSport26:
Global Voices. Shared Solutions.
The future of safe sport depends on recognising that expertise exists across the system.
One global ambition, many locally led solutions
Safe sport should be for everyone, everywhere.
But getting there will require more than one model.
The strongest approach is likely to combine:
shared global principles
with
local knowledge, leadership and implementation.
That means being clear about rights.
Being serious about accountability.
Listening before designing.
Building with communities rather than for them.
Supporting local leadership.
Recognising different levels of capacity.
Learning across regions.
And refusing to confuse cultural sensitivity with accepting harm.
The goal is not uniform safeguarding.
It is effective safeguarding.
Safeguarding that people understand.
Safeguarding they can access.
Safeguarding they trust.
Safeguarding that works in the environments where sport actually happens.
Globally aligned.
Locally informed.
Locally led.
Everyone, everywhere, safe in sport.