Global Health
We’re still here – opinion
June 27, 2024
To have a good time Pride Month, Richard Lusimbo of the Uganda Key Populations Consortium speaks on Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill and uniting communities within the fight.
For nearly twenty years, I even have witnessed continued cruelty and stigmatization of key population groups, not only in Uganda, but throughout the black community around the globe.
For too long, LGBTQI+ people in Uganda and across the African continent have faced discrimination, social exclusion and prosecution, limiting their access to work, healthcare and more.
A toxic mixture of prejudice and laws, including Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act 2023 (AHA), has driven the LGBTQI+ community underground.
In Uganda, LGBTQI+ people are actually less more likely to search out essential life-saving services, resembling HIV prevention and treatment. People who use drugs are routinely denied essential harm reduction treatments. Sex employees are sometimes assaulted and extorted by clients and police.
Across the continent, marginalized communities face intersecting types of discrimination based on socioeconomic class, gender identity and sexual orientation.
So cycles of poverty and marginalization proceed, health inequalities widen, HIV and other diseases may spread, negatively impacting mental health and overall well-being.
In 2018, we founded the Uganda Key Populations Consortium (UKPC) to place an end to all of it, challenge draconian laws just like the AHA, and push for equality and justice for key populations.
In those days, lots of us didn’t have a house – a spot where we could sit together and say: that is what we’d like as a nation and what we represent.
UKPC brings together LGBTQI+ people and folks from other key populations to specific themselves, learn and construct community. We work with partners to create protected spaces – drop-in centers – across the country where our community can connect, access health services and make their voices heard.
Thanks largely to those drop-in sites, we’ve got seen an enormous increase within the number of individuals starting antiretroviral therapy, using HIV self-testing toolkits, and taking steps to stop sexually transmitted infections.
We also forge strong relationships with civil society, non-governmental organizations and government partners who support us and our work in our community, despite ongoing challenges.
Today all our work is in danger.
AHA encourages brutal abuse and discrimination against my community. latest report paints a grim picture: for the reason that AHA was passed, the LGBTQI+ community in Uganda has experienced 434 evictions and expulsions, 309 incidents of violence, 92 recorded cases of mental health disorders and 69 arrests.
The law also threatens individuals who support the LGBTQI+ community and supply or seek essential health services.
Our community organizations have closed dozens of social services centers, cutting off critical connection between individuals and their peers – not to say vital mental and physical health care. We have provided much-needed funds to maintain our offices and meeting spaces protected. We cannot ensure that reaching people online is protected and that their information and identity will probably be protected.
Regardless: we fight. I’m fighting. Our community is resisting.
Changing the established order would require more work and support. We need partners just like the Global Fund and its Breaking Down Barriers initiative because these programs empower communities to steer – and provides us a voice. They also give us a platform for collective motion in order that we are able to proceed to work against the violence and hatred that some days seem inevitable.
Change is feasible when communities come together.
Pride is a moment of celebration and protest. Every June I take a moment to shut my eyes and give attention to myself, to honor myself and the community that created me. To take into consideration what we’ve got achieved and the work that also must be done. This yr isn’t any exception.
We are happy with who we’re. No law can take that away from us.
Richard Lusimbo is the founder and CEO of the Uganda Key Populations Consortium and a long-time LGBTQI+, human rights and health activist. UKPC is a partner of the Global Fund’s Breaking Down Barriers initiative, which goals to cut back human rights-related health barriers.
This article was originally published on Washington’s Blade.