In 2018, Accountability International began documenting the tacit knowledge that sits in the minds of our African lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex, queer and gender non-conforming activist friends and colleagues.

This knowledge is not yet being actively documented, nor analysed, nor disseminated for use in decision-making of those working to advance the human rights of LGBTI/GNC Africans.

We at Accountability International, believe that the knowledge, opinions, and experience of these people is vital to informed decision-making by anyone working in the field of human rights in Africa, especially allies, funding partners, and the United Nations bodies.

For this reason, we conducted interviews with 22 LGBTI/GNC African activists and allies, and without changing what they said, we offer you their words here.

We hope that their analysis of the situation, their thoughts and advice on what should be done to improve access to equality, as well as their warnings, are heeded by us all as we push forward for equality. To be clear, we did not intend to capture personal experiences of human rights abuses; but some stories did emerge and in the interest of keeping the work as honest to the actual responses of the activists, we have kept the content almost untouched and unchanged (except for removing identifiers and structuring phrasing for comprehension purposes, but only where vital).

We promised interviewees that all identifiers would be removed to allow the interviewees to be as frank as they desired, without fear of repercussion. Not many were worried anyway, given that they are a fearless bunch, but we kept our word anyway.

We call this - the Community of Practice research - at Accountability International because our overall goal is to ensure that we share and leverage each other’s knowledge, analyses, skills and know-how to arrive at equality as quickly as possible.. Read more via Accountability International