However, as these laws are being implemented, it has become apparent that much of the international aid community does not understand how to navigate these environments while still meeting the humanitarian needs of LGBTQI+ persons. In response, international aid actors have by-and-large abandoned LGBTQI+ programming and turned their back on these extremely vulnerable, marginalised communities.

And all the while, 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.

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.

Local civil society, already strained and under threat, have frequently been forced underground or even have to flee. Shelters close while sympathetic health clinics or legal services are forced to turn LGBTQI+ people away.

LGBTQI+ Historical Context and Contemporary Politicisation

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.

The reality is that 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.