Save the Children International (SCI) is preparing for mass layoffs at its London headquarters and five regional offices amid a major restructuring aimed at addressing a projected budget shortfall.
“Without action in 2024, we face a forecasted gap on our operational budget of $15-$20 million in coming years,” says an internal organisational design proposal titled “Fit for the future”, obtained by The New Humanitarian. The proposal was presented to staff at SCI headquarters and regional offices on 5 August.
The International Rescue Committee announced staff cuts the same day. Both moves are a sign of turbulent financial times across the aid sector as humanitarian funding levels continue to decline from their peak in 2022.
The New Humanitarian reviewed SCI’s “Fit for the future” proposal in addition to other internal documents related to the restructuring.
SCI faced a drop in unrestricted funding last year coinciding with rising costs and inflation, the proposal says.
“The challenge we are facing as an organisation is that our costs are growing faster than our income and we do not forecast that this can be addressed simply by raising more money,” senior leaders wrote in a document shared with staff addressing frequently asked questions.
“It’s a shitshow. It’s really bad. They’ve got it so wrong.”
The restructuring will cut hundreds of staff roles at the headquarters and regional levels. This is expected to place more than 500 of the around 1,750 staff at these levels “at risk of redundancy”. Current employees will be invited to compete against colleagues in similar roles over a reduced number of jobs.
The organisational restructuring is expected to be implemented in October, with selected staff moving into their new roles.
Country offices will not be affected by the restructuring, the proposal says.
“This is a significant change for our organisation – the largest since SCI was founded 14 years ago,” CEO Inger Ashing wrote in her introduction to the proposal. “[B]ut I am certain it is a necessary one if we are to continue having a sustainable impact on children’s lives now, and in the future.”
The plan, however, has raised concerns among staff facing potential redundancy, as well as staff who say that deeper institutional issues – such as diversity, pay inequality, and racism – have not been sufficiently addressed.
“It’s a shitshow. It’s really bad. They’ve got it so wrong,” an SCI staffer whose job has been put at risk by the restructuring told The New Humanitarian on condition of anonymity. They described the process as “absolutely brutal”.
Managers have been unable to answer straightforward questions put to them, the staffer said, which was “reflective of the fact there were lots of top-down decisions made that weren’t led by regions [or] the country offices – the people who are actually delivering the work”.
Director of SCI’s Global Media Unit Belinda Goldsmith told The New Humanitarian that an advisory group of country directors provided feedback on the design of the restructuring and that regional and headquarters staff have been invited to listening sessions to give their input.
A flatter structure
The “Fit for the future” document lays out SCI leaders’ ambition to make the organisation flatter and more interconnected. “We will specifically avoid creating a separate regional ‘layer’,” it says.
Two layers of the organisation – headquarters and regional – are slated to be removed, and their functions will be reallocated to newly created “global teams”.
Whereas SCI currently has five regional “finance functions” and one at headquarters, these will be consolidated into a single global team, Goldsmith said.
The organisation will still have regional directors, but they “will not be in the direct operational line” in the new structure. Instead, they will “spend more time on external representation and strategic engagement”, according to the proposal.
The restructuring has raised concerns and made staff “very pissed off”, the at-risk staffer said, because the growth of regional offices in recent years was meant to support overstretched country teams and provide vital contextual advice to headquarters.
“We’re worried a really critical part of the infrastructure is now completely removed,” they said.
The “Fit for the future” document addresses this concern, saying regional expertise plays an important role in some activities, “but not all”.
Goldsmith said the organisation will maintain its “strong regional presence, recognising the importance of contextual understanding and language in everything we do… What will change is reporting lines and any areas where there was duplication”.
“[Management’s] whole framing is… to better support country offices, but they can’t back up why they’ve chosen this restructure,” the staffer told The New Humanitarian.
SCI is also exploring the possibility of reducing spending on office space, including by vacating its London office before the lease ends at the end of 2025, the proposal says.
Questions about the details of the restructuring still linger. The exact number of staff redundancies will not be clear until at-risk staff undergo a series of consultations this month. These staff have been asked to elect representatives who will offer senior leaders “counter-proposals and ways to mitigate impact” of the restructuring.
At-risk staff have also been offered individual consultations to discuss how they are affected and what options are available to them. In early September, some at-risk staff will be selected for a reduced number of roles, while others will be made redundant.
“A lot of people are quite worried,” the staffer said, adding that the organisation’s top-down approach “completely ignored” previous consultations with staff.
Questions raised about DEI
SCI’s new, flatter structure has been billed by management as a source of empowerment for country offices. The restructuring proposal also assures staff that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) will be prioritised in selecting staff to be retained.
But staff charged with designing the restructure, dubbed “functional leads”, were, “very, very Global North and white”, the staffer said.
“The functional leads group was not reflective of Save and the people we serve. I don’t know to what degree country offices were truly consulted and truly central to the design phase and decision-making,” the staffer said. “Based on what’s happening this week, it feels like they weren’t at all because people were horrified.”
“I see many colleagues not taken seriously, not respected enough, not considered for positions they are more than qualified for, and worst of all – not respecting our first-hand experience [...]”
A document labelled “DEI Dashboard” shared with SCI staff shows that women make up 55% of at-risk staff, while men make up 37%, and the rest are unclassified.
Goldsmith said that the panels charged with selecting staff for retention are diverse and are required to complete DEI training. Staffing changes will also be tracked “through a DEI lens”, she said.
In the weeks leading up to the restructuring announcement, SCI staff were already grappling with a series of internal controversies that raised questions about the organisation’s commitments to local empowerment and DEI.
In a resignation letter shared with some colleagues on 3 July, and seen by The New Humanitarian, a departing staff member accused SCI of “chronic institutional racism”. The letter leveled criticism relating to: a lack of diversity among leadership; pay inequality; a lack of awareness of staff experiencing crises; complicity in neocolonialism by politicising aid; and genocide denial, referring to SCI’s public communications about Israel’s war in Gaza.
The departing staffer, former SCI data analyst Akram Al Mahyni, noted that these issues were particularly important to address as the organisation embarks on its restructuring.
“I see many colleagues not taken seriously, not respected enough, not considered for positions they are more than qualified for, and worst of all – not respecting our first-hand experience in experiencing and responding to a crisis and setting up localised responses and scaling up in our home countries,” wrote Al Mahyni, who is from Syria.
His letter also accused SCI of “extending neocolonial agendas” by allegedly allocating more of its Humanitarian Fund to Ukraine than to the rest of the world combined in 2022. The Humanitarian Fund was launched in 2021 to provide flexible, unrestricted funding for sudden onset emergencies.
Goldsmith said some of the funding channelled through the Humanitarian Fund is earmarked by donors for a specific crisis. “Funding earmarked for [the] Ukraine crisis can only be spent in Ukraine,” she said.
Al Mahyni addressed this issue in his letter, writing: “It is shocking how much we allow donor governments to dictate SCI.”
“Instead of reaching out to other INGOs and making a united stance where we tell donors that we are the experts and we would allocate the money proportional to the needs, we allow those donors to dictate us, fearing that if we don’t accept, [they] would fund another competing INGO,” the letter said.
Tension over Gaza
Al Mahyni’s letter also denounced an April social media post by Save the Children US, which called for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza but did not mention the crisis facing Palestinian children.
“Arab children during an ongoing genocide are not seen by Save the Children,” he wrote. “[H]ow would I expect that Arab staff [will] be seen or taken seriously?”
The letter warned that “SCI’s continuous chronic fall deeper into racism and being a neocolonial tool” would prevent the organisation from being welcomed by communities in the Middle East.
“Save the Children’s direction needs to change if you really want to be ‘fit for future’,” he wrote, alluding to the proposed restructuring.
In an interview with The New Humanitarian, Al Mahyni said he hoped his letter would circulate widely and ensure that “a restructuring led by a core team of exclusively white people” would not ignore or exacerbate the problems of racism, diversity, or the politicisation of aid at SCI.
The day after Al Mahyni sent out his letter, Ashing, SCI’s CEO, shared it with all staff via email. She commended the author for drawing attention to “entrenched and long-standing issues relating to diversity, equity, and inclusion”.
“I am wholeheartedly committed to Save the Children being an anti-racist organisation,” she wrote. “This is a moment for us as a leadership team to reflect on and learn from Akram and others’ experiences and clearly set out how we are, and will continue, strengthening our organisation and living our values.”
That same day, 4 July, more than 120 staff in SCI’s Palestine office issued an open letter to senior leadership, seen by The New Humanitarian. They demanded more freedom to “effectively advocate for Palestinian children”, accusing the organisation of censoring their messaging “to appease powerful members” and preventing them from holding the Israeli military accountable for violating the rights of Palestinian children.
“We are frequently censored for the vague justifications of ‘risk’ or ‘politicisation’, without any evidence being provided,” the letter says.
The authors pointed to SCI’s response to a June operation in the Nuseirat refugee camp, in the central Gaza Strip, where Israeli forces killed at least 274 civilians, including 64 children, while rescuing four hostages held by Hamas.
“Once again, global sign-off prevented us from speaking out on this devastating mass casualty event,” the letter says. “As Palestinians, we felt that this told us that our lives hold less value than Israeli lives. They also proved that our safety, reputation and ability to operate are significantly less important than the wants of senior management.”
Goldsmith said SCI’s global sign-off requirement is applied to all conflicts.
“We have repeatedly called for a definitive ceasefire, improved humanitarian access, the protection of all children from physical and mental harm and accountability for grave violations,” she told The New Humanitarian.
She added: “Save the Children takes the concerns raised in both letters very seriously and has actively engaged with all staff on these matters and continues to do so.”
Edited by Andrew Gully and Irwin Loy
