The International PRIDE Centre’s Vision for SOGIE Inclusive Emergency and Humanitarian Responses

The unique and specific needs of persons from sexual and gender minority communities are identified, included, and responded-to with empathy, safety, and urgency by response agencies during emergencies.

Local, national, and international emergency, humanitarian and development actors are supported and empowered to respond to SOGIE communities’ needs in humanitarian settings; they can access the resources to implement impactful assistance without compromising the safety of their staff, restricting LGBTQI+ staff (and allied) voices, or jeopardizing operations.

NGOs, donor agencies, and diplomatic missions are equipped with the tools and resources needed to anticipate, prepare for, and adapt to restrictive anti-LGBTQI+ legislation.

The PRIDE Centre is rooted in a foundation of anti-racism and aid decolonisation across all outputs and operations. We embrace SOGIE communities in all their diversity, inclusive of indigenous understandings of non-CIS sexual identity and gender expression and identity.

It became apparent that most emergency response actors simply do not know how to build LGBTQI+ inclusive programming for emergency responses, while others do not even know that they should.

Meanwhile, trans refugees from DRC are being turned away from health centres in Kampala, while LGBTQI+ Ugandans seeking asylum in Kakuma camp in Kenya hold on to years-long dreams of finding safety abroad.

Laws and regulations prohibiting and criminalising SOGIESC individuals, organisations, and those that assist them are rapidly expanding throughout the world.

In Africa, discriminatory colonial laws outlawing homosexuality were imported and enforced by European colonisers. Today, while South Africa and Namibia have equal marriage and ten African countries have LGBTQI+ anti-discrimination laws, dozens of others criminalise SOGIESC identities. Several countries, many being influenced by foreign evangelical and fundamentalist movements, are now working to supplant old colonial laws with new, violent, punitive anti-SOGIESC laws. Some countries have introduced the death penalty for certain practices. In addition to expanding criminalisation of a range of specific practices and identities, most new policies also contain clauses criminalising “promotion” of homosexuality and include imprisonment for failing to report LGBTQI+ people.

Laws or policies to this effect have been introduced or are in various stages of development in Niger, Mali, Kenya, DRC, Burkina Faso, South Sudan, Burundi, Malawi, Ghana, Zambia, and Nigeria.

In many countries, homophobic governments influenced both by US evangelical political agendas and Russian-based disinformation campaigns are directly targeting SOGIESC individuals as well as NGOs and civil society and criminalising their work. NGOs and civil society are being targeted and criminalised with “promotion” clauses or subject to a “duty to report” individuals suspected of being LGBTQI+.

Even in jurisdictions where these identities are not criminalized, LGBTQI+ needs are overlooked – even excluded – by aid agencies including NGOs, UN Agencies, and donors. The result is that SOGIESC communities – already among the most vulnerable in the world – are left behind by the very agencies whose core mandate is to protect and assist the most vulnerable.

Rather than seek ways to safely provide aid to LGBTQI+ persons or provide enhanced protections to their LGBTQI+ staff and partners, many international agencies responded to the introduction of new anti-LGBTQI+ laws by simply deleting any reference LGBTQI+ persons and their needs from their programmes and operations. Simultaneously, capitals and headquarters issued statements condemning country X and Y, without regard for how this actually helps to reinforce perceptions of cultural colonialism.

In the meantime, local civil society groups that were already strained and under threat, are forced underground or even have to flee. Shelters close while sympathetic health clinics or legal services are forced to turn LGBTQI+ people away.

Yet many international aid stakeholders who widely proclaim to align with global humanitarian best practice and are bound to the International Red Cross’ Fundamental Principles of Humanity, Impartiality, Neutrality, Independence, Voluntary Service, Unity and Universality, neglect these core principles mandates when it comes to assisting LGBTQI+ people.

Many cultures in Africa have rich traditions and histories embracing diverse sexual orientation and gender identities.

However, many politicians and governments have sought to frame SOGIESC identify as a western import and a degradation of “African Values”. This argument conveniently skirts the fact that it is imported western – and eastern- cultural texts and modern evangelicalism and fundamentalism that are the colonial cultural imports.

Ample evidence spanning cultural and oral traditions, anthropological, historical and archaeological substantiates the truth that diversity and fluidity in gender and sexual identities and practice has been an accepted part of African society well before colonisation.

Throughout the world, cultural difference are frequently used as a crass political trinket used to provide distraction from gross human rights abuse, democratic degradation, sustained poverty, corruption, fraud, the theft of resource wealth, environmental degradation, and abuses of power. LGBTQI+ persons prove an easy target.