To the unwavering American donors and AJWS community members, I’m writing you from my home in Uganda with an important message. I’m one of AJWS’s human rights experts here in East Africa, supporting our partners fighting for the sexual health and rights of women, girls and LGBTQI+ people. For my security (and the continuation of our work), I need to remain anonymous.
But I must tell you: If there is anything I have learned in recent years in this role, it’s this — we are up against mounting challenges, and we have got to get creative.
By ‘we,’ I really mean we — you and I, and all of the other people fighting alongside us for a world where women have autonomy over their lives and bodies, and LGBTQI+ people can live with safety and dignity. Many of the threats we face here in East Africa are mirrored by what’s happening in the United States: a growing movement to restrict these rights under the guise of ‘family values.’
In Uganda, this has meant the passage of the Anti-Homosexuality Act (AHA) in 2023, a cruel law that makes same-sex love punishable by life in prison. In Kenya, this means the proposed Family Protection Bill, a law that would strictly limit sex education for Kenyan youth, harshly suppress LGBTQI+ organizations and piggyback on Uganda’s AHA, effectively outlawing homosexuality across the country. This may sound more severe than what’s happening in your country, but these are largely the same struggles — I hear echoes of President Trump’s discrimination of transgender people, or his gleeful upending of abortion rights in how African politicians and conservative leaders speak and act.
That’s why I want to share with you how activists and social change organizations here, many with the support of AJWS, are fighting back.
To illustrate our fluid, ever-evolving fight, I’ll point to the Pan-African Conference on Family Values (PACVF). In May 2025 in Nairobi, Kenya, this conference drew conservative leaders, thinkers and policymakers, and was backed by American far-right research institutes like The Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM) and Christian fundamentalist groups like Family Watch International. Their goal? To strategize how to build African societies centered on “family values.” In practice, this meant promoting anti-LGBTQI+, anti-sexual health and anti-women’s health policies — exclusionary ideologies that discriminate against minorities.
To repeat a line I’ve heard from many American allies: queer people have always existed, and they will not be erased. We cannot allow bigots in power to push them back into the shadows.
And so I am proud to say that, with AJWS support, a grassroots movement of progressive organizations mobilized, strategized and creatively fought back against PACVF.
First, we did our research. The PACVF was to be held at Boma Hotel in Nairobi — a venue that boasts The Red Cross as a majority shareholder. Our movement, in collaboration with other organizations like Amnesty International, sent an open letter to the Kenya Red Cross Society exposing the contradictions between its humanitarian mission and the hosting of hate groups. The Red Cross responded, but their denial of responsibility was disingenuous. We issued a formal rejection of their justification and turned up the heat through other means.
We organized city marches and protests. We placed ads on billboards lining the route from Nairobi’s international airport to the Boma Hotel, greeting PACVF delegates with messages like “True family values don’t exclude anyone.”
In short, we made noise. A lot of noise — and our cries against this conference spread far and wide through headlines, op-eds and interviews in Kenya and around the world. The Guardian, France24, Al Jazeera, The Economist, local Kenyan outlets and more all covered our cause and brought millions of eyes on our struggle.
By exposing the funding and ideological ties between PACFV and global based-based hate groups like C-FAM and Family Watch International, we redefined the conference as a neo-colonial project, not a grassroots African movement. Indeed, the same Christian fundamentalist groups pushing for discriminatory policies in the United States came to Kenya to do the same thing.
We didn’t stop PACFV from taking place on Kenyan soil. But we succeeded in growing a grassroots movement of women, LGBTQI+ people and allies who refuse to believe that “family values” are defined by who is not included.
And that’s my message for you — for your fight against the very same oppressive powers. Get creative. Find allies. Make noise. The world is watching. And together, we will not fail.