In January, I started a new job at the International Protection, Rights, Inclusion in Displacement and Emergencies (PRIDE) Centre. The Centre is a new organisation dedicated to advising aid agencies on how to better include lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI) people in humanitarian programming. In the last six months, I have travelled to South Africa, Malawi, Nigeria and Burundi to talk to LGBTQI rights groups in each country—and also to Switzerland to advocate for better inclusion of these populations at the United Nations. But where I have learned the most about the situation for LGBTQI refugees, and been able to spend the most time with people from the community, is in Kenya—my adopted home, on and off, for over a decade. 

I had expected my new job to be a steep learning curve. What I was not prepared for, was that it would awaken a deep, frustrated rage inside of me. I am a human rights lawyer, which means I am always working with some of the world’s most marginalised people. But at least amongst the people I normally represent, they have their natural supporters—usually amongst those I would count as my own community; those who may describe themselves as the progressive left. I am currently doing an online master's degree on the side on Gender and Sexuality in Global Politics—a course populated entirely, I would say, by more of “my people.” In this course, we learn about the evils of homonationalism: that is, the co-opting of LGBTQI liberation movements to push neoliberal agendas, or even to violently interfere, in countries from the Global South. We see this happening right now in Gaza, for example, where Israeli soldiers have dressed up genocidal acts in claims of fighting for gay rights¹. 

There is no Western-backed war being waged in Kenya—but there are certainly neoliberal financial agendas being pushed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. As I started my job with PRIDE, I wondered if I would learn that these entities were enacting a homonationalist agenda here. Perhaps they were, in the words of the academic who coined the term homonationalism, using “lesbian and gay liberal rights discourses to produce narratives of progress and modernity that accord some populations access to citizenship—cultural and legal—at the expense of the delimitation and expulsion of other populations.”² What I found, instead, was a deafening silence on LGBTQI rights by internationals within the country—often excused by a desire to not be seen pushing “Western culture” on an African state. 

Even before starting my role with PRIDE, I had heard these arguments being made. In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the National Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (NGLHRC), confirming its right to freedom of association, and ordering the NGO Board to process its registration application. When this happened, I took to social media to celebrate—only to be told by progressive friends, both Kenyan and foreign, that I should treat the verdict with caution: it was likely the result of US interference in the country’s judiciary. The messaging was exactly the same amongst those on the right. Following the NGLHRC’s victory, hundreds of religious leaders and conservative activists gathered outside the Supreme Court in downtown Nairobi, holding signs saying, “LGBTQ is not African,” and “Resign—you failed Kenyans.” A member of the Kenyan Parliament involved in leading the protests made a speech proclaiming that, “In Kenya, as in other African countries, most customs, cultures and religious traditions consider homosexuality to be wrong, unnatural and ungodly.” ³ 

Following the anti-LGBTQI protests in 2023 came the introduction into Kenyan Parliament of the draft Family Protection Bill. Same sex activity is already criminalised in Kenya through a provision of the colonial era Penal Code—but people are rarely prosecuted under this law in practice, and the country has long been considered by queer asylum seekers in the region as a relative safe haven. Reading through the Family Protection Bill for my interview prep, I was shocked: The Bill, if passed, would be the most draconian anti-homosexuality law in the world. It imposes the death for what it terms “aggravated homosexuality”—which includes, for example, same sex activity between consenting adults over the age of 60. It prohibits queer refugees from seeking asylum in Kenya, in violation of the Refugee Convention. It makes it mandatory for everyone to report people they suspect of violating the Act. It criminalises not only the “promotion” of homosexuality, like Uganda’s notorious Anti-Homosexuality Act (AHA), but also its “normalisation”—which makes it punishable by a minimum of ten years imprisonment. 

The Bill closely models the Ugandan AHA, which gained global notoriety as the harshest anti-gay legislation in the world following its adoption in 2023. When the AHA passed, the World Bank put a stop on any new funding going into Uganda, announcing it would not approve any new projects in the country unless the government agreed to particular mitigating measures to prevent discrimination against LGBTQI populations (which it has done as of June 2025). Going into the job with PRIDE, I wondered what I was supposed to think about this. Was this a case of the World Bank imposing its own values on a sovereign nation, in a form of neo-colonialism? Was it homonationalism at work? 

After numerous and extensive conversations with East African queer rights activists, I have learned two pieces of information that, while not directly answering these questions, seem to invalidate the premise of them. First, anti-LGBTQI movements across the region are fuelled by US-based Christian evangelicals pushing an anti-gender, anti-rights agenda around the world: a blatant display of neo-colonialism that is far better funded and resourced than any efforts on the pro-LGBTQI side. Second, progressive actors in the international humanitarian sector have not only remained eerily silent on this issue but have often validated the conservative narrative that queer rights are being pushed in Africa by the West—leaving LGBTQI rights organisations in the region with few allies or supporters. 

New Neo-colonialism: the Anti-Gender, Anti-Rights Movement  

Since taking up the role at the PRIDE Centre, a major part of my job has been to meet with queer rights activists in the countries we work in—especially those from refugee or internally displaced communities. Given the backlash against sexual and gender minorities since the NGLHRC’s court case, the spectre of a new draconian law, and simultaneous increases in hostility against the refugee population in Kenya—another group scapegoated by the country’s deeply unpopular government—I was not sure how active this scene would be. What I found, immediately, was a vibrant presence of highly organised refugee activists, all across Kenya, from every letter of the LGBTQI alphabet.  

During my second week on the job, I was invited to a festival in Nairobi that a group of queer refugees had organised amongst themselves. Here, they showcased their art and fashion designs, provided all the catering, and staged musical performances. I found myself in conversation with a revolving door of activists, mostly Ugandan, telling me about the daily challenges of their lives and work. They described the multiple fronts on which they fight their battles. Many are trying to have painful conversations with the families and communities from which they have been rejected—often violently—yet remain a core part of who they are. Now, as refugees, they must also seek to change perceptions in their host state. Most of them hope that Kenya will just be a stop along the way to their resettlement—but the immigration authority has had an unofficial moratorium on processing refugee applications for LGBTQI asylum seekers since 2019, highlighting the necessity of doing advocacy and lobbying in-country. In this, these groups are supported by Kenyan LGBTQI organisations, who many are working with on events, art shows, short films and other projects aimed at changing minds and attitudes within the broader Kenyan population. 

In conducting this public-facing advocacy, all of the activists that I have spoken with—in Kenya and across the continent—describe the formidable challenge of shattering the myth that queerness is a Western import. In May of this year, the second “Pan-African Conference on Family Values,” organised by the Africa Christian Professionals Forum, was held in Nairobi, coinciding with a dramatic increase in online and offline vitriol against the queer community. The stated aim of the conference was to “defend traditional African family values,” including against the “promotion” of LGBTQI “ideologies.” ⁴ 

The first irony of this narrative, as is often pointed out in these debates, is that laws criminalising homosexuality first came to this continent via the colonisers. This is very noticeable in my work as a Legal and Policy Advisor, because every former British colony we are working in has the exact same sodomy provision in its Penal Code. The second irony is one I was not fully aware of until I started this role—which is that the wave of anti-LGBTQI sentiment we see today is so heavily pushed and funded by actors in the Global North. Protests organised by religious leaders around the continent have been financially supported by organisations such as the Virginia-based Human Life International.⁵ The Pan-African Conference on Family Values, which ignited the wave of attacks against queer people in Kenya, was funded by Family Watch International (FWI), the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and the Centre for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam)—all three of which are US-based organisations designated as anti-LGBTQI hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC).⁶ The preliminary list of speakers slated to speak at that “Pan-African” conference consisted entirely of white men.⁷ 

Learning this, some things I had noticed about Kenya’s draft Family Protection Bill clicked into place. The law is clearly based on Uganda’s AHA—but reading through it, I had been struck by the feeling that many of its provisions seemed lifted from a context outside of East Africa altogether. There is a whole section, for example, which prohibits all forms of involvement in same sex marriages. Such marriages are already illegal in Kenya; there has been no movement towards allowing them. The Bill aggressively comes after anyone who uses a bathroom designated for a member of the opposite sex, making this punishable by ten years imprisonment—an issue central to the moral panic around trans rights in the Western world, but which I have never heard discussed in this region. It outlaws “cross dressing,” in a country where the traditional attire for men of various ethnic groups includes robes, wraps, feathers, and jewellery. I knew the Kenyan Bill had been written by the Kenyan MP Peter Kaluma, who had based it on the AHA. But the AHA, I was told by the queer Ugandan refugee activists, was written by an American evangelist called Scott Lively—a man later sued by a Ugandan LGBTQI organisation in the US for crimes against humanity. A quick look into the Kenyan legislation confirmed that MP Kaluma had not drafted or submitted the Bill on his own. His financial and technical backer? The FWI—that same SPLC-registered hate group responsible for organising an all-white panel in a conference ostensibly on the values of the African family. 

The Silence on the Left 

The second lesson I have learned in my current role, is that it is not only American anti-gender crusaders or local religious and political leaders eager to accept their funding who reinforce the narrative that queerness is foreign. Too often, this idea is also echoed by progressive international actors—those I would consider “my community.” In my master's course, tutors argue that we should not equate advancements to LGBTQI rights in the Global South with Euro-centric ideas of “progress.” In the meetings I have at work, older white men in Country Director positions warn that we should not bring our Western values into humanitarian programming—while simultaneously admitting they have never given thought to how queer refugees are accessing aid or services. 

I fear that I may have once been susceptible to these arguments. I had listened to the friends who cautioned me to be suspicious of the Supreme Court ruling on the NGLHRC case, for instance, suggesting it must have been influenced by US pressure behind the scenes. And as someone who has always worked in gender, I have been reluctant to raise issues of gender identity or expression, unsure of how it would be received in the “local context.” 

But it wasn’t the United States that secured the NGLHRC’s right to register—it was the NGLHRC itself, which filed the case in 2013 and pursued it through the courts for a decade. In 2018, at Kakuma camp in northwestern Kenya, queer refugees organised what is believed to be the first pride parade in a refugee camp in the world—without the kind of foreign support received by religious leaders and conservative activists to protest against LGBTQI communities. At the queer refugee festival I attended earlier this year, I was the only non-African in sight. 

Since starting my role with PRIDE, I have been delighted to discover that Kenyan and refugee-led LGBTQI groups are leading creative, community-based advocacy efforts events, quite literally, almost every single day. Yet whenever there is progress on LGBTQI rights, conservative (often Western backed) actors rush to claim these developments are being pushed by the Global North—and instead of challenging this claim, too many international organisations indicate a willingness to believe it. It is not Western actors driving progress in this space. More often, as LGBQTI+ activists have continuously told me, these organisations have had to be dragged into action. 

LGBTQI Exclusion in Humanitarianism 

 One needs to look no further than the routine exclusion of queer people in refugee and displacement settings, in Kenya and beyond, to see how little international aid groups have done to meet even the most basic rights of LGBTQI populations. Aid systems, like most other social structures, are built around heteronormative and cisnormative assumptions about who people are and what their families look like. Food ration cards are given per household—and households are assumed to be parents with children, or multigenerational families living under one roof. Many services are gender segregated. Healthcare centres set up in refugee or IDP camps will generally have no idea how to provide sexual and reproductive healthcare to trans, intersex, or non-binary people. Discriminatory attitudes amongst aid workers abound. There are no international rules or standards mandating the inclusion of LGBTQI people in humanitarian responses—like there is with women, for example, or children, or people with disabilities. 

When I met the refugee groups at that Nairobi festival, a coalition of them were planning a protest outside the UNHCR offices in Nairobi. They said the fact they weren’t being recognised as refugees wasn’t just a problem for their eventual resettlement but also meant they couldn’t access services offered at Kakuma refugee camp—a place they were expected to live, if they were to ever have their applications processed, for years. It has been frequently reported in Kenya that discrimination regularly prevents LGBTQI refugees from accessing aid, including food, shelter, water, and health support inside Kakuma—and that homophobic and transphobic attitudes and violence come not only from the other camp residents, but from humanitarian organisations and service providers. ⁸ 

The humanitarian organisations and coordination mechanisms operating in this environment have inadequate strategies in place to protect LGBTQI refugees and displaced people—in Kenya, regionally, and globally. In Kenya, as in most Global South countries, it is local LGBTQI organisations who are on the forefront of providing services to their own communities, and who are the most vocal and relentless advocates for their own cause. 

Part of my role at the International PRIDE Centre is to help build bridges between local queer groups and international humanitarian organisations—to create space for dialogue; to allow international organisations to learn from the experiences of local ones; and to ultimately produce better and more inclusive aid infrastructure. But this work cannot begin with the assumption that we, as international actors, are the stewards of LGBTQI rights. We must admit to ourselves that to date, in the world of humanitarian programming, we have done almost nothing. For decades, queer organisations in this region, many of them refugee-led, have by necessity taken up roles as both service providers and human rights defenders. They do this work under constant threat and with limited resources, while facing fierce opposition driven and financed by actors in the Global North. In any conversations with local LGBTQI rights organisations, we—those of us who are internationals, who describe ourselves as progressives, who are ostensibly dedicated to the principles of humanitarianism—must show up with this reality firmly in our minds. 

Footnotes 

¹ E. Graham-Harrison (2024) 'This article is more than 1 year old ‘No pride in occupation’: queer Palestinians on ‘pink-washing’ in Gaza conflict' The Guardian, available at www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/16/queer-palestinians-lgbtq-israel-pride-flags-gaza-conflictpink-washing  

² J. Puar (2013) “Rethinking Homonationalism’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 45, pp 337. 

³C. Stewart (2023) 'Hundreds oppose LGBTQ people during slanderous Kenyan protest' Erasing 76 Crimes, available at https://76crimes.com/2023/10/12/hundreds-oppose-lgbtq-people-during-slanderous-kenyanprotest/ 

⁴ N. Waigwa (2025) 'Second Pan-African Conference on Family Concludes in Kenya with Renewed Conviction to Defend Family Sanctity', Acia Africa, available at www.aciafrica.org/news/15625/second-pan-africanconference-on-family-concludes-in-kenya-with-renewed-conviction-to-defend-family-sanctity   

⁵ Human Life International (2023) 'Malawi Rejects Same-Sex Marriage, Human Life International Applauds Decision', available at www.hli.org/press-releases/malawi-rejects-same-sex-marriage/ 

⁶ J. Williams (2025) '‘We’re ready to fight’: activists brace as US anti-rights figures descend on Africa' The Guardian, available at www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/may/09/africa-family-values-antirights-conferences-conservative-christian-abortion-lgbtq-gender-uganda-kenya-rwanda 

⁷ T. Osoro (2025) 'All White Panel Meets in Nairobi to Discuss African Family Values' Kenya Times, available at https://thekenyatimes.com/africa-news/all-white-panel-meets-in-nairobi-to-discuss-african-family-values/ 

⁸Ibid.