 Hey, hello everybody and a very warm welcome to today's IED debates event where we are looking at heteronormativity in the development sector and where we are now. My name is Juliet, I'm an Events Officer at IED and I'm going to be behind the scenes and providing some technical support during this event today. So if you're having any tech issues, hopefully not. If you are, just give me, send me a message on the chat panel and I'll be around to provide some support. That is it from me on housekeeping, which means I now have the lovely job of introducing our moderator for today, Tucker Landsman. He is a researcher in IED's Human Settlements Research Group. Tucker, over to you please. Thanks Juliet. Welcome to everyone joining us. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening depending on where you are. As Juliet says, my name is Tucker Landsman. I'm a researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development or IED. I lead a project called What Does Queer Have to Do with It? Making Space for LGBTQI Plus Contributions to Sustainable Urban Development and Climate Action. And I will be moderating today's event. I'm joined by my colleagues Anna Carthy, Morgan Jennings and Juliet Tunstall. And by our invited speaker, Suzy Jalee, Honorary Associate at the Institute for Development Studies and guest discussant, Dr. Essen Nyak, Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. In the year 2000, the Institute for Development Studies hosted a seminar series on queering development convened by Suzy Jalee. The seminar series and subsequent publications sought to call in queer theory to development studies. Participants challenged essentialist understandings of gender based on the sex binary, as well as heteronormative and Western-centric focus on material development trajectories. Dr. Karine Mason referred to IDS as a central hub for integrating sexuality in development and Jalee's work as foundational towards a queering of development studies. Over two decades later, research on gender and sexuality now exists as a small but established subfield of development. Important contributions include the handbook of queer development studies published in 2018 and an increasingly wide literature on queer sexualities across the majority world. In practice, civil society has developed programs that target the health and well-being of gender and sexual minorities, and we've seen significant increases in resources flowing to LGBTQI plus civil society groups, driving visibility and civil rights. However, this subfield remains very much a subfield, leaving gender and sexual diversity fragmented and largely unnoticed by major actors and resource streams. According to the Global Resources Report, nearly 80% of funding to LGBT focused programs and projects outside of the USA focus on either civil and human rights or public health and well-being, and the vast majority of that public health funding goes to HIV prevention and treatment. Vertical programming initiatives such as HIV, AIDS, treatment, care, education often focus on subpopulations deemed especially vulnerable, in this case men who have sex with men and trans women, and this can end up excluding other diverse gender and sexual identities. Notably, of the global funding flowing to LGBT civil society, 1% or less targets housing and homelessness, labor and employment, food security, and humanitarian response. No funding was identified for climate action or environmental concerns. This points to a glaring gap in our knowledge regarding how LGBTQI plus people access housing and essential services. Are gender and sexual minorities served by or excluded from grassroots initiatives? Can they take part in economic development programs, governance projects, and resilience boosting activities? Too often, we have to make decisions based on anecdotal evidence and small-scale observational studies. Coming through what little quantitative evidence does exist, the World Bank concludes that gender and sexual minorities are disproportionately poor. And multiple reports note how disaster relief and COVID recovery programs have excluded queer minority populations. We think the time is ripe for change. Today is the first public event of the project. What does queer have to do with it? In the coming months, we will convene dialogues to explore how organizations led by gender and sexual minorities are responding to the climate crisis and urban inequalities. And we will ask, how can action research and work programs by organizations like IED can support those efforts and build inclusive responses to sustainable urban development and climate action? We will use creative writing as a methodology to explore how gender and sexuality have shaped our experiences in the development sector. And we are working with old and new partners to examine the everyday urban lives of LGBTQI plus refugees and asylum seekers in and around Nairobi, Kenya. This new area of work is based on three premises. First, we believe that there was an ethical obligation to include gender and sexual minorities in our frameworks and programs. From COVID recovery to climate resilience to sustainable urbanization and forced displacement. Phrases like leave no one behind necessarily includes people of diverse sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions and sex characteristics. Second, we believe that we have a lot to learn from queer thinking and from working with LGBTQI plus civil society in different geographic contexts. For example, how to ground intersectional approaches, thinking beyond the binary or building networks of solidarity among diverse populations. Finally, we think the time is now. The era of putting gender and sexual diversity in the two political or two difficult blocks is over. 68 countries criminalize same-sex sexual activity. However, political violence and anti-LGBT policy are not confined to aid-receiving countries in the majority of the world. The recent news out of Russia is terrifying, as are the LGBTQI attacks in the United States and the policies that erode the dignity of trans youth and adults in countries like the U.S. and the United Kingdom. So yes, we've experienced and continue to experience backlashes. But in the recent past, there has been a groundswell of initiatives led by gender and sexual minorities. And this work is increasingly relevant to the climate crisis, to rampant economic inequality, to housing, forced displacement, and other traditional subfields of development research and practice. Opportunities for building truly inclusive approaches to development and climate research and action exist. It is our responsibility to identify and follow them. It is now with great pleasure that I introduce our speakers today. Susie Jolly has over 30 years of experience working on sexuality and gender. They are an honorary associate for the Institute of Development Studies, where they teach and supervise students and work as a freelance consultant, researcher, communicator, facilitator, and trainer. From 2010 until 2017, Jolly led the Ford Foundation's Sexuality Education Grantmaking Program in China, and supported the development of Chinese philanthropy and research on gender and sexuality dimensions of China's global-south relations. Before working at Ford, she founded and convened the sexuality and development program at IDS. 11 years ago, Jolly published an article titled, Why is Development Work So Straight? Detailing the ways that international development was heteronormative. That is to say, designing interventions based on heterosexual household stereotypes, and framing sexuality as a problem of ill health or violence rather than its potentially legible contributor to well-being. Jolly revisited her assessment in a recent paper titled, Is Development Work Still So Straight? Heteronormativity in the development sector over a decade on. We welcome Susie today to continue those reflections in dialogue. Our discussant is Dr. Esa Niak, a multidisciplinary scholar and associate professor in Africana and gender studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. They are trained in political economy of development at the University of California, Los Angeles, with specialization in international relations and comparative politics. Dr. Niak has pursued two research streams to date. The first stream is centered on the political economy of development, governance, and global public procurement reform, with an interest in social justice, race, and gender responsive schemes in government contracts. The second stream reflects on gender and identity politics. They have written extensively on interdisciplinary topics such as queerness and politics, public policy, gender equity, ethics and religion, public procurement reform, economic inclusion, and human rights. Without further ado, I will hand over the floor and remind our participants that the chat function is open for you to introduce yourselves, to share comments and resources. But if you would like to ask a question to one of our speakers, please use that Q&A function and feel free to write the questions as they occur to you, and we will come back to them during the Q&A session. Susie, the floor is yours. Thank you so much, Tucker, for that lovely introduction. And thank you, SN, for being my discussant. I am super honored that you're here. And I'm also very excited about the audience, which is very intersectional. I can see there's people who work on refugees, LGBT, poverty, climate, and a whole range of topics. So I'm really looking forward to you helping together think through some of these questions and sharing your experiences and insights as well as your questions. I just want to check. Can you see my screen? Does it? That is perfect. Okay, great. Okay. Thank you, everyone. So heteronormativity in the international development sector, where are we now? As Tucker said, this comes out of an article that I wrote 11 years ago on why is development work so straight, and which looked at how the development sector is heteronormative, assuming heterosexual gender stereotype household models, and framing sexuality as a problem of ill health, violence, or population control, and never a potentially pleasurable contributor to well-being. And I've revisited these ideas and reviewed what's happened with the development sector and heteronormativity in the last decade in an article published this year is development work still so straight. Now much has happened in between the two articles. So it's not been a great 10 years. There's been COVID, new and ongoing wars, intensifying climate crises, and a crop of new leaders with associated with democratic deficits, right-wing populism, anti-gender movements, and in the global north also attacks on the development sector and cutting development sector budgets. In the development sector in the global south, south-south cooperation has grown and can now be seen as bigger than north-south development aid in size, depending on how it's measured. Very little research has been done on how south-south cooperation engages with gender and sexuality, and I do look a little bit at this in my article, but I'm not going to have time to talk about it today. So on to the main question, heteronormativity in the development sector, where are we now? So Christine Clopier describes a discursive explosion on the topic of LGBTI rights and development aid. With President Obama instructed USAID agencies to include LGBTI, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expressed solidarity with LGBTI, but then UK Prime Minister David Cameron called for decriminalising same-sex sexualities and making development aid conditional on LGBTI. And in response, the Ghanaian president said he would not be cowed by gay aid, and activists in Ghana saw a rise in violence against people perceived as LGBTI due to their association with this Western power. So these kinds of statements can make things better, but they can also make things worse, and mostly they've stayed on the level of statements, not commitments. One exception is the European Union, a very important exception, which adopted legally binding guidelines on how to take forward LGBTI rights in international development. And these are the statements, the commitments and the discourse. What about the resources? As Tucker said, there have been an increase in funding for LGBTI-specific initiatives. This chart put together by the Global Philanthropy Project, which describes how LGBTI people organise for rights to survival, as well as to access joy, pleasure and embodiment. They've tracked the funding to LGBTI in Global South and East. Each block is a two-year amount of funding together. So you can see in 2019 to 2020, there was 184 million US dollars. And so this is real money. Most of the funds on sexual orientation go to general categories of LGBTQ with 9% going to lesbians, bisexuals and queer women, and 9% going to gay, bisexual, queer men and men who have sex with men, and 11% targeted at transgender communities. So it's real money and it makes a difference, but it's still a tiny proportion of total development aid. For government, international development aid, it's only 0.04% of this aid goes to LGBTI-specific initiatives, and it's a little bit higher for foundation funding, but still small. But I do want to recognise that this funding has enabled many wonderful initiatives to happen. These are just three examples that I picked. I could have picked so many examples from around the world, but these are some of the things that international funding have helped happen. So one is the sexual minorities of Uganda suing the US evangelical pastor Scott Lively for crimes against humanity for fermenting homophobia in Uganda. Another is the Chinese queer comrades and gays and lesbians of Zimbabwe running Chinese-African queer exchange and documentary making, and then the Latin American Caribbean network of transgender people catalyzing change in the region. But this programming remains limited. It's niche programming. There has not been a broad review of development programming for inclusion of LGBTI people. There has not been a response to Dr. Niax call for sexual rights agendas to engage with public priorities such as poverty reduction. And there hasn't been an engagement between poverty reduction and LGBTI or other dimensions of sexuality. So with the heteronormative household models still largely in place, the bulk of development sector funding continues to exclude LGBTI and a little bit of niche funding around the edges won't solve that problem. And furthermore, there's been co-option on many different levels. So Christine Clopier talks about homo developmentalism, which is the idea that more developed nations are more tolerant of homosexuality. And Andal Gossini refines this. He explains how in colonial times the existence of homosexuality in global South contexts and other sexual norms which diverged from Victorian moralism was judged as an indicator of backwardness and lack of civilization. And now the schematic has flipped and a tolerance for LGBTI is dis is or a lack of tolerance for LGBTI is judged as being backward and uncivilized. And this is a very unhelpful and inaccurate construct, particularly because it feeds into the homo colonialism identified by Moomin Rahman. And Rahman explains what homophobic Arab state leaders and colonialist Western LGBT movements agree on is that leadership on LGBT comes from the West. So I'm not saying that by any means that all Western LGBT movements are colonialists, but there are strands of thinking and practice that emerge that are colonialists in these movements sometimes. And the this thinking sees the West as somehow more advanced on LGBT and sees the constructs around LGBT identities and strategies as automatically transferable to non Western contexts, and that somehow the Western LGBT movements are going to save and rescue LGBT people in the global South and East. And this in turn enables homophobic Arab state leaders to identify to to argue that LGBTI is a Western import and to name a homophobic strategy as an anti colonialist move. And this leads on to global homo capitalism, which Rahul Rao has described with global institutions of capitalism, such as the World Bank, positioning themselves as external to the problem they seek to alleviate, and pinkwashing themselves with support for LGBTI. And so in the 1980s, the World Bank structural adjustment programs undermine the health sector. And this meant that the this particularly in Africa, African states, African governments then needed to procure services from the private sector to provide health support, which can be sometimes less accountable and less inclusive as Dr. Nia has addressed in their work. And sometimes the providers of services were evangelical churches, which were homophobic and promoted abstinence only approaches, which were very exclusive in terms of health provision and particularly damaging around issues like HIV AIDS. So the World Bank economic policies can be directly connected to exclusion of LGBTI, but instead of recognizing and examining the exclusions within their economic policies, they can pinkwash themselves with by voicing support for LGBTI, which serves to soften their harsh economic image. So I've raced you through how the international development sector has included an instrumentalized LGBTI in the past 11 years. And now I'm going to do the same for pleasure. So Anne Philpott from the Pleasure Project has described a pleasure wave hitting the scene. Is this the case or not? Well, it's certainly true that the idea of pleasure has been emerging in influential places. So for example, UNESCO's International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education, which is a very powerful framework that's one of the main guidance for comprehensive sexuality education globally. In the 2009 version, pleasure was mentioned just twice in the text. In the 2018 updated version, it was mentioned 11 times, including as a goal, an indicator and a key topic. And Latin American Caribbean governments have made a call for young people to be able to have pleasurable and healthy sex lives and make their own decisions regarding their sexual orientation in the groundbreaking Montevideo consensus on population and development. And the World Association of Sexual Health has adopted a declaration on sexual pleasure. And all of these platforms are framing pleasure as a right and good for health and well-being, which in turn is argued to be good for development and helps to meet the sustainable development goals. And some evidence is being gathered. The Pleasure Project together with the World Health Organization did a meta analysis of the impacts of sexual health programs and found that if they include pleasure, if they include sexual pleasure, it increases the likelihood of safer sex and can also improve self-esteem and self-confidence in relation to sex. There's also been work on the links between pleasure and empowerment, including this book which I co-edited in 2013, which looks at how some populations, excluded populations such as lesbians, bi and queer women, postmenopausal women, people with disabilities and people living with HIV have expanded the possibilities for their own pleasures in ways that has empowering impacts and help gets beyond victim paradigms. And there's also been framings of pleasure as decolonizing. So for example, eminent African feminists such as Sylvia Temali, Stella Nyanze and Bibi Bakari Yusuf argue that pleasure approaches can challenge colonialist framings of African women's sexualities as about either sin or victimhood. And these concepts are put into practice by the Association for Progressive Communication Erotics Program, which supports marginalized majority world people to contest online violence and build online spaces for their own pleasures. And also the Agents of Ish, Indian sexuality education media site, which challenges Western dominance around sexuality by mining the erotic traditions of India and repurposing them for contemporary life. So all of this is a huge step forward to see pleasure becoming visible in international development, work on health rights and empowerment, breaking previous silences. And it is limited to some statements, commitments and guidance. It hasn't shifted to mainstream approaches, but it is a huge step forward. But we also need to consider, is there anything inherently liberatory about pleasure or can it be co-opted like LGBTI? So what are some of the limitations of the pleasure discourse? Sexual pleasure discourses can be normative and exclusive and something that people experience pressure to live up to and not necessarily freeing. And we all know that pleasure is a huge marketing strategy for commerce, advertising and pornography, which are not necessarily liberatory. And in one case, a pleasure promoting intervention replicated the worst of international development practice. Clitterade, a US-led initiative, promised to build a pleasure hospital in Burkina Faso to perform operations to restore the capacity of clitoral orgasm to women who had undergone female genital mutilation. The project lacked consultation with women who themselves, it lacked consultation with existing hospitals already providing related surgery, and it focused on technical rather than social solutions and lack transparency. So classic bad development practice. And even worse, they invited supporters to contribute donations by adopting an African women's clitoris with appalling echoes of colonial occupation of African women's bodies. So this example shows that bringing pleasure into the equation does not in itself save an intervention from appalling development practice. So in some, these 11 years have seen some progress on pleasure and on LGBTI, but with limitations and co-option. So in conclusion, I want to think about if an integrated approach to sexuality could help overcome the limitations and co-options. And part of the reason why I think a more integrated approach is needed now is anti-gender movements, which restrict sexual and reproductive health, rights and education, abortion, oppose acceptance of LGBTI and create a new definition of gender based on biological determinism. So they've put all the different sexuality issues in one ball. So a fragmented or disconnected response is inadequate and can leave us divided and more easily co-opted. So what kind of an integrated approach? What might this approach look like? On a conceptual level, a framework is needed that recognizes how sexuality intersects with other axes of inequality, such as economic or north south, and how sexuality is deployed for political ends, such as homo-colonialism. And some grounding can be found in Gayle Rubin's classic work, calling for sex to be understood in terms of social analysis and historical understanding, and seeing gender and sexuality as systems of power, which reward and encourage some individuals and activities while punishing and suppressing others. This is the framework deployed by Sexuality Policy Watch, which is a brilliant organization based in Brazil or led from Brazil. And they, for example, use this approach to analyze how COVID's impacts are mediated by sexuality and gender systems. So for example, economic impacts disproportionately hitting women in the service sector, particularly domestic workers and sex workers, domestic violence increasing, including against young queer people trapped with their families during lockdown, sexuality education being left out when schools go online, and in some countries in Latin America, there were gender segregated lockdowns with on some days only men permitted out in public and on other days only women, leaving people with non-conforming gender expression in a bind. And governments such as Poland, Hungary and Brazil used COVID as an opportunity to enact anti-gender and anti-abortion laws and anti-gender forces connect with COVID conspiracy theories around sexuality. So that's an example of how you might use this framework to analyze a phenomenon. And what would such a framework mean in more concrete terms for the development sector? Part of the answer is about more collaborative movements. So again, this is from the Global Philanthropy Project, who've tracked funding to find that the anti-gender movements worldwide received three times more funding than LGBTI movements from 2013 to 2017. And their risk conclusion is that donors should fund a collaborative response to the anti-gender movement, bringing together LGBTI, sexual and reproductive health and rights, children's rights and women's rights. And I add that these collaborative approaches need to be sex positive, intersectional and decolonizing. And there is some experience of working in related ways in HIV work, for example, the pitch program, which supported over 100 organizations and networks of young women, LGBT people and men who have sex with men, drug users and sex workers, using sex positive approaches to collectively organize and advocate to shift governments from punitive to public health approaches. They weren't always successful. A broad-based coalition in Indonesia did not succeed in bringing about a more liberal civil code, as you might have noticed from the news these last few days. But in some countries, such as Mozambique, Uganda and Vietnam, there were shifts away from punitive approaches for some populations to more public health or more supportive approaches. And these are the kinds of thinking and action which give me hope. And in these dark times of war, pandemic, climate crisis and conservatism, we need more than ever joined up thinking and solidarity that can't be twisted to other purposes or used to pit one progressive cause against another. Thank you. Thank you very much, Susie, for that talk. As moderator, I'm going to be very brief here and just hand right over to Dr. Nyak for their discussion. Dr. Nyak. Thank you, talker. And thank you, Susie, for your presentation. I am particularly delighted to be here because the question of LGBTI and development has been one that is at the center of my heart, but one I have struggled with because I was born and raised in Cameroon and I was there when the movement, if you may call it movement, started in Africa to talk about LGBT issues. And while at the beginning we sort of adopted this acronym as we're trying to figure out things, it became very clear to me very quickly that we needed to recalibrate approaches. But it was a very hard sell for partners and NGOs and people who based in the US or Europe were interested in the question of LGBT. There seemed to be a tacit consensus that the way to go is the political way only. So I am delighted that about 20 years after or so this conversation is coming back. That was introduced to you as a scholar, but let me add something which I think is very relevant to the conversation today. I also hold the title of Bumbo Kokua among the basa impu and bati of Cameroon that is three ethnic groups. And that means that that is the highest initiative title a man or a woman can hold. And I'm going to be responding a little bit more from that angle because I think this is something that is important. I see some folks from Quebec and I don't know whether there is a translation, but shout out to the French speakers in the room. Now back to the issue ahead. Development and again I'm going to be talking about Africa, but I think more or less this can be applied or to other regions. Development in Africa is a problematic term. I think we are witnessing the fifth rendition of what development is. And our stake here is the fundamental idea and pattern that in fact if we ask each other, we look at each other and say, what do you think is an Africanist definition of development? I bet you a few of us will come up with a line. So development has been from the decolonization era, a way of kind of maintaining the puppet government that we put there. So there was an era of that sort of thing. Then we move to Europe, Tatcher and Reagan in the US kind of thinking, oh, what is the state? Nonsense. Gotta have to make it shrink it. But in Africa it meant oh, giving more money to the dictators. Democracy wasn't a big deal. But we were hit later with something called structural adjustment, version of no small government. Telling African people, don't send your folks to school, right? No, don't treat them. Health and education, gutted. Which means that the luxury of sitting and debating ideas, we were told, that's not what you need. Then came an era of, oh, money to the state, no, no, no, this is democracy now. Civil society becomes a buzzword. Democratization, every way. We don't want one party, multiple parties. And as we say in French, I do think in Montaigne-Couche-Souris, a giant mountain gave birth to a mouse in that democratic project. And now we are being told, even that civil society were maybe not. Now we are in the model of public-private partnerships. I think that's the aloof did too. Whether that means, whether the private means corporations or the private means civil society. So then when we talk about development and bring the question of LGBT, it is important that we hold two things in our hands. And I know a lot of you working in development agencies have your heart in the right place. We have to hold, on one hand, the realization that we are not escaping this pattern. Whether we as individuals actually have our heart in the right place. And then ask ourselves to the extent that we are leveraging this new category, come my name, LGBTI. What is it that cannot escape the pattern on one hand? And what is it that we can do differently? And as Suzy mentioned, there is certainly a need for integrating a lot of things. But again, development in Africa has always been a reaction to something else. Whether it is about global politics, and that is exactly how colonialism happened. So what is it that the LGBT, as a special group or a group of concern, allows us to bring to the table? Is it just sexuality? Or pleasure? What is it exactly? And I'm raising this question so that we can enter a conversation. I'm not here giving you recommendations. But I'm sitting here mostly with that cultural title, because I think there is some question that you, in such a friendly conversation or place, is important that I raise because they are important. It is important that you hear these things. Now, Suzy mentioned, and a lot of people have said this, and this is true, that the colonial Africa or the pre-colonial Africa is a place that is eclectic at best. You have societies that are inclusive. You have those that are not. And while all of these things were suppressed in many ways, others actually survived. And hence comes the trap of a state centered only approach. And that is to say, should we be making a distinction between, on the one hand, human rights, which by definition are matters of laws and given to by the state conferred by the other state? Or are we then going to go back to that which Africa has developed and survived, which is a bad protection, social protection? Because why would we invoke better inclusive practices in the past? If the rationale, the imagination, the content, the thing that went into it, we are not interested in integrating. And that is to say, I do believe that to some extent, African cultural imagination and practices must be taken seriously, because it is only through them that we understand our relationship to the environment. If you were concerned about looking at climate and these sort of conversations, let me give you a very practical example. I began by telling you that I hold this title, and that means I went through a series of initiations. And one particular level of initiation, we had to tweak things, because it had to take place in a like at a riverside, except there is no river, because it dried up because of climate change. So, Africa to me is not just bodies that are suffering or having pleasure or doing this and that. It is a place that is a container of everything else. It comes with the ability to conceptualize phenomenon, social phenomenon. It's the meaning that we put into this river that gives us the ability to safeguard the river. It's the meaning to give to the body that allows us to respect the body. It's the meaning that will give to friendship, sexual or not, that allows us to safeguard certain ways of being erotically or not. Hence, while people like myself do engage in scholarship from what has become scholarship from what we have in the 21st century, and that is not a bad idea, we are facing a cognitive crisis. And that is to say, our intervention, if we truly want to use this LGBTI body or person or group or community, and do something that is fundamentally different, what that body, what that agent, what that person, what that community must be calling us to do, is to engage in a deep relational approach with Africa. We have today a phenomenon whereby some state, we had two problems after independence, some state criminalized homosexuality, yes, and some did not. Now, if in your intervention, your priority is about going where and working uniquely with those who criminalize homosexuality, how is that different from the pattern I just told you? Why is it that in our intervention, some places, some communities, some region, are just overfished? What is it that you extract after 10 years, I say almost 20 years now, by fishing in the same pond? That is what we should be doing that is different. Yes, some countries criminalize homosexuality, others do not. Let's work with both so we understand how eclectic, both welcoming and really challenging Africa is. Some countries have deep criminalized homosexuality, some have increased criminalization. So we cannot say that this is a one-size-fits-all. And it will hold this to be true. Therefore, when we are saying we need, which I fully support, because I do think that it is impossible if we cannot build these coalitions between women's rights and all of that. But coalition-building is not just about convening a meeting and writing a report. It is about spending time to locate that which, the thing that resonates with the African mind. And I'm not saying it's a special mind. I am saying that we are too eager to dismiss that part and get into the technicality of this and that. And that is a problem. Now, let me perhaps end with another example. Many of us know countries like Liberia, you know, where for many, many years in a civil war, it took women to stand up to say, we want peace. And Muslim and Christians coming together, that is a documentary about the work of, I think, I don't remember her name now, but I think she won a Nobel Prize for her work for peace there. When you watch this documentary, they tried everything, the women's movement there to bring about peace. They tried the Bible to talk to the president who was allegedly a Christian. Oh, they realized that it didn't work. They tried the Quran. No, the rebel were not interested. They tried everything. They tried politics, negotiation, calling for men to sit at a table. None of that work until at one convening in Ghana. When the leader of the movement decided that those men were either going to sit and talk, or the women were going to take off their clothes. That is what turned the things around. At that point, you saw all the president coming out of the conference room talking to women, now begging them not to do that. That is not a recommendation from a human right declaration. That is a long practice that resonates everywhere in Africa. It has a cultural meaning that once you tap into it, things must change. So let's not undermine or neglect this idea that Africa is a repository of ideas and perhaps locate those that truly work and give us a chance, even if we are locked up in an institution, at least for those of those who want to do things differently and better to allow ourselves to do that. The human rights concept in Africa is not about rights only. It's about duties. The language of duty resonates because I may be queer, but I still have a duty to my family. Let us not throw it away because we have adopted this liberal idea that the individual is independent and omnipotent. So on the one hand, you can really be disenfranchised based on your sexuality. But on the other hand, you have other mechanism that says you are also claimed as belonging. And I think until, and this also is a dance, when we are integrating or thinking about coming together, are the things that we need to inject in our interventions or what I want to call them intervention partnerships or conversation or dialogue so that this project of harmonizing, integrating can actually survive and bring about something that is different from the usual practice of development. I will stop there for now. Thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. Nyak. There's a lot for me to process and to think about. But Susie, I'll give you five minutes to respond before we open up to, and clearly in five minutes you couldn't respond to all of those provocations, but perhaps you pick one or two and then we'll go to the Q&A. Thank you. Yes, thank you so much, Dr. Nyak, for that really rich provocation and also the corrective around which perspective of sexual rights we're talking about. So a sexual rights perspective which focuses on decriminalization laws and the state is completely inadequate and may not be appropriate, something I agree with, and also that building coalitions isn't just about convening a meeting or convening people together. It's really looking at deeply at what people have in common and intersections and also what they're bringing from their contexts. And I mean that as much what a Western group might be bringing from their context, which should be seen as completely contextually specific and not necessarily transferable or helpful in a different context, and also what you said about engaging with African cultural imagination and practices and taking these seriously, including the meanings that have been given to the body, the environment, and relations, and the safeguarding that can come out of that which might be a very different approach to human rights perspective based on the state. So I think that's very helpful for me to think about what a more integrated approach to sexuality might integrate and what it might do or how it might be developed. So I think I'll stop there. Those are my initial responses, but I hope we can carry on your input and responses to your input throughout this discussion. Thank you. Thanks, Suzy. I think something that really resonated with me was also what is that coalition building look like with organizations such as IED that kind of prioritizes and privileges kind of what we might consider deep or longstanding partnerships and to remember that we probably often look for examples in civil society that is quite easy for us to read, right, to identify with and thus we end up replicating this very Western ideas around sexuality. And that's something that I and my colleagues will need to pay close attention as we move forward with this work. At this point I will call in my colleague Anna to kick off the Q&A. Thanks, Tucker. And thank you so much, Suzy and SN. Those are really, really such rich discussions. So I'm really looking forward to hearing the other questions. I think the first thing that I wanted to, the first kind of question I wanted to frame around climate change and the context of the climate crisis. There seems to be this increasing recognition that questions around sexuality are really important to climate justice and vulnerability to climate change is intersectional based on gender, race, class, disability, and also on sexual orientation, gender identity and expression and sex characteristics. So the root causes of vulnerability to climate change are linked to that power and privilege and who is being disadvantaged or excluded and LGBTQI plus groups are those who are historically marginalized in decision making processes and in access to rights and resources. So in a context of heteronormativity and cisnormativity that marginalizes queer people in everyday life, that it can be exacerbated during climate shocks or in times of societal stress. So we saw that happening in the pandemic and with compounding climate impacts that will only become more important. So in your article and in your presentation, Suzy mentioned the need to address gender and sexuality in ways that are less identity based and that move towards this integrated approach to sexuality. And you've previously written as well that simply including LGBTQI plus people in existing approaches may not address the injustices in the development sector, which I think links really nicely to what Essen has been speaking about. So I wonder how do you see that applied in the context of climate crisis? What do you see as the climate just way forward for climate action to be inclusive of diverse expressions of sexuality and gender and to challenge homo polonialism as we address these urgent issues of loss and damage and vulnerability to climate change? Thank you. That's a very good question. And I think it's important to see and make the deeper connections. So things like looking at how colonial forces have exploited environments and at the same time suppressed sexual and gender diversity among the populations they colonized and how the anti-gender movement links with climate denialism. So it's on the basis of these deeper understandings that climate action needs to consider how to become less heteronormative. And this will need to happen on many levels, including, for example, the narratives and framing. So it's often talked about saving the environment for future generations. Does that make sense when many LGBTI people have been denied the right to have children or don't have children and many people are not having children specifically because of the environmental crisis or cost of living crisis that we're in. And then in terms of practical work on a practical level, I think there has been quite a bit of work from organizations by organizations such as Edge Effect and the Humanitarian Advisory Group looking at how to build a longer-term resilience of LGBTI to deal with the climate crisis. And if that needs to be part of a longer-term strategy to help build the resilience in humanitarian responses and to respond to climate crisis. And I think there's also questions for LGBT movements to consider. For example, I've heard of several examples recently of Shell funding LGBT action in Vietnam, in China, and we have to get beyond this short termism where we think, great, I have funding for my little part of the puzzle and don't connect it up to the broader implications for people of LGBTI or not. Thank you. Asen, do you have any other thoughts to add or shall we go to the next question? Next question. Okay. And this actually might follow up with what you were talking about, Suzy, on the heteronormative stereotype models in development. We have a question with a number of likes from Clara. Can you please say more about the relationship between heteronormative family models in development planning and the women and girls agenda amongst development agencies and actors? Yes. I mean, my original article came out of an experience where I was working, doing research in rural China. And we had a very backward kind of questionnaire based on a very heteronormative family model. So we go and ask who start with who's the head of the household, which was assumed to be a man and positing everyone else in relationship to him. And often the man had migrated. So that really wasn't helpful or not even feasible. And then assuming what is your marital situation and assuming that people are going to be married, which is the norm in China and the law in terms of family planning, you weren't allowed to have kids without being married. So that they were normativities, which in some ways reflected the law of the Chinese legal context, but not the Chinese reality because some people were saying to me, I'm, you know, I some people describe themselves as illegally cohabiting because they weren't old enough to get married because you had to be age 22 as a man to get married at the time in China and age 20 as a woman. So there were lots of people. And then we never asked about anyone who was not heterosexual, even though I was there as a bisexual researcher. And even though I knew Chinese LGBT people who'd migrated from the countryside specifically because of their sexuality. So it's it was very that kind of research was automatically right from the start erasing any kind of non normative agendas. And that research was the basis for a program on electrification and poverty and gender and energy. So I think it it needs to start from the research and the questions asked on which the programming is based. And there also needs to be checklists and reminders about what needs to be addressed and included, not just on LGBTI, but on things like Mo Min Raman has a very useful little article on the homocolonialist test for interventions. So you can think, you know, necessarily, people are busy and you can't have a you need to have a deep reflection that gives the grounding for the action. But you also need to have some kind of short cuts for people making things happen that don't involve too much time. And those kinds of tools can be helpful to kind of getting beyond the limitations of heteronormative thinking in household or heteronormative assumptions about households, whether it's in research or programming. Thanks for that. And I think that homocolonialist test is actually quite a useful tool that maybe other people would like. So maybe if anyone in our audience has that open on their browser or knows where it is, they could pop the link in the chat so other people could see it. I think then the next question I'm going to kick to Essen. And I'm going to combine two of the questions from the Q&A, the first from Thomas Kloeg and then Eliara Michaels. And so on the one hand, we have the question, what is the importance of language in the context of coalition building and advocating for policies to advance LGBTQI rights? And what is the role of researchers in choosing language that brings important stakeholders to the table without watering down or decentering, particularly marginalized, and then using communities? And I think related to this question is what can be done to shift perspectives so that these conversations are actually led from those perspectives of African sexualities, including queer African sexualities. And what can we do to avoid repeating the same patterns we've seen with feminists or other forms of social movements being co-opted into business as usual interventions? Well, that is a good question. I think language matters. And also in Africa, most of the continent, as far as I know, is a wealth of a great repository of our tradition. And that's where we derive our meanings. And what is interesting is that there's a lot of imagination that goes into understanding all of these stories, how we derive meanings, how we make meanings, et cetera. Now for the researcher, let me start there. It depends because, I mean, there are some researchers who are based in think tanks that are at universities and the game is not always the same. But one of the things that I've seen, as far as African queer study is concerned, it has become a white field, which is very puzzling to me. And if you are a researcher and you do care about this and you do care about social justice, you have to ask yourself, why is it that 20 years after people, the majority of people who are holding good jobs with the safety to actually say what they think with that privilege of Africans, there are very few. But I guess that would take us far afield. But for practical stuff, I think also Simon wrote something that is really important in the chat says that, for example, the way we enter the conversation, there is a lot about the economic impact of when you are writing, who are you writing for? Economic impact tend to be research that wants to speak to the word bank, right? Folks who are interested in those sort of macro numbers, but they actually have little impact on the ground. So here are choices that everyone of us can make in terms of where do you want to calibrate your intervention? And what is motivating you? Is that just about a report that is due at the end of next year? Or is it commitment to some sort of social transformation that is long lasting? I know the pressure on the NGOs is always result result but I'm not trying to change that. But we have to also interrogate that and understand that that is a particular neoliberal management style that we are all rocked in, right? And not behave as if this is like the normal course of doing business. No, it is that's what I said in the beginning that I think on the one hand we have to recognize the constraints, all of us myself included as a scholar, right? The constraint in which we are, myself less so now. But there are also ethical choices that we can make. And I think for all those of you who are in Europe, in America, in Canada, you have more wiggle room and more leeway, right? Especially at the beginning of LGBT activism in Africa, there was a phenomenon where a funder will say, I have money for this and then look for people who want to do that. Things have evolved where now people can have actually an input in saying, you know, maybe those 60 days of activism are not the best way to go. How about we are not just going to say we are discriminated. LGBT needs to become the lawyers that are going to defend the community, right? They need to become the doctors that are going to defend the community, right? And unless we start investing in society in that way, the idea that you can come to Africa and pick the LGBTI person as a thing and focus on it, it's going to have, I'm not sure how the mileage that we can derive from it. I think climate change is an opportunity, is frame right. I am very hesitant to link climate change and talk about LGBT. I think what it would do is that it alienates actually conversation about climate change. Not everything has to be about LGBT. I know that when something is like the new thing, people want to hop on it because, you know, funding and all of those things. But here is how you could message it. Because in fact, climate change doesn't choose sexuality when you really think about it. So isn't this an opportunity actually to reframe intervention and actually talk about, hey, yeah, we may disagree on this and that. That's fine, right? But is this thing choosing? It doesn't choose. The rain doesn't choose the rooftop to where it lands, right? And this is where I'm talking about really spending time to think about how we conceptualize the message because a lot is lost. You know, when at the beginning I started saying to folks, this state-centered activism is going to create a lot of backlash. Nobody believed me and it did because we were not prepared politically to enter the field as strategists. And the same thing I'm saying, it really might sound sexy to say climate change and LGBTI, it is the wrong way of talking about it. It will not work, not for the work of climate change, not for the LGBTI. But it is an opportunity, in fact, to say, hey, how about we start bringing community around this thing? When that river dried up, it's not just a matter of who is initiated. I can see the impact. But guess what? That whole village, that whole region is suffering from this. And this is where I'm saying that you ought to have some kind of belief or some kind of respect for Africa in that sense, right? That it's not about things happening. The meanings behind things is what bring us together. And that has always been the context in which queerness rise in any part of Africa, including my own country. So let's think about to what extent this discourse on discrimination works. And how can we, or not working actually, and are there other ways to engage in a way that gives back Africa that agency to appropriate certain questions and frame them? I mean, why are we even calling ourselves LGBTI? Because that is an acronym that works. But do you know there are countless ways Africans call themselves? Why is that not adopted by any organization in programming? So that when you actually enter a community, you make sense. Those are small things that we can do. But they require a vision. They require commitment to engage and not just perhaps a project to work on and move on to something else. Thank you. Thank you, Esen, for that response. And there's also maybe, Susie, you would jump on the kind of, are there type of any quick wins that you are looking for there? People recognize that this work takes years, decades, generations, but they're interested from an organizational standpoint, what they can do now in order to perhaps set the stage for some of this more inclusive work. So is there anything that you would like to see or you think that organizations should be doing right now? Well, there are some things that also connect with what Esen said that I think are happening from some angles which address some of those issues, which is if you want to give organizations space to develop their own agendas instead of being pulled into some maybe western, maybe global agenda, which isn't what's needed, then donors providing core funding for organizations makes a big difference. And that has started on some level. And I think if you're partnering with an organization, then that's, I mean, there's the obvious things about how co-creation of the intervention, not just kind of contracting people in to do what you want, but also can you be providing some kind of core support and organization building to enable that? And then another thing which is happening and which it depends which organization you're coming from, whether it's something that you can do, but kind of democratization of the decisions around who gets support. So, for example, the East African sexual rights initiatives, which pools donor funding from international donors, which is managed by a Kenyan organization, and it's specifically for sexual rights, particularly LGBTI and sex workers, and the people who make decisions on who should get that funding are a committee of representatives from those organizations which are elected and change every year. So, you're ensuring some kind of contextualized decision making by shifting the power closer to the ground. And just one example of what that has changed, that is before those organizations, before that mode of funding, as usual, organizations which speak good English and can relate to donor frameworks and have good relationships or can foster good relationships with donors were the ones that dominated the funding. And after the East African sexual rights initiative was found, it diversified the organizations who got funding. So, there was one organization of Maasai tribes people who wrote a letter on hard copy on Swahili as their application and they got a small grant in response. So, it kind of changes what's possible and who can get the funding. And those organizations, there has been since this funding network was founded, there have been others developed for each region in Africa and it's part of a broader participatory philanthropy movement. So, I think those kinds of approaches can really make a difference in terms of shifting power which enables people to make shift approaches. Thank you. And I think as you were really talking about how climate and LGBT won't work or won't it does put us in a difficult position almost for you to rock in a hard place because whether or not we name people of diverse sexual orientation gender denies expressions and sex characteristics as having a role to play or as stakeholders in climate action. They are disproportionately suffering when they don't have access to shelter after a disaster when they are deemed ineligible to receive certain aid packages and services. And so, I think what you're doing is you're pointing to there's a lot of work to be done in how we talk about these issues and how we build programs that are truly inclusive because as of now and also not just climate but IID has been a leader in responding to urban informality for example for decades and we often talk about inclusive approaches to urban poverty but gender and sexual minorities are totally invisible in our data. And so, I think this first recognition is a first step and recognizing the challenge is indeed an action. Language is important, language is an act. And there was another question that popped up in the Q&A. Can I just say something, push back a little bit if I may. Can I say something in response to what you? Please do. Yeah. Okay. I know of no country. Let's say this is, we had a massive rain, we have a flood and what happened, people helped each other in most African countries where before any government solution or public solution comes in. This is not the U.S. where we're talking about shelters. Yes, if you live in a refugee camp that is a completely different conversation. I mean, things like even social security. Let's just say that a handful countries in Africa that have such a system in place. So when I hear for example, LGBT disproportionately discriminated for things like shelter. What I have to ask myself is, how did that happen? How is that possible? I am very, on that note, I want to be skeptical here. Now, I know the case of Kenya, I know the case of refugees there in a camp where to get there, they had to be identified. What is the reason for you to be here? That is a completely separate issue. But it's not like anybody is wearing a LGBT on their face. I have heard a lot of, it is the same thing about HIV discrimination and I don't know where people get that sort of idea. I lived in Cameroon my whole life, at least until 26. In fact, Cameroon started testing people for HIV as a result of grant money given by the World Bank and things like that. And these were campaigned. Anybody could go there for the testing. And please, I want to beg all of us here to really reconsider the assumptions we make about what it means to be out. I could be out in the U.S. It doesn't mean I am not in danger in certain spaces. So I have to check with my friend, should I drive there alone? Should I dress? Should I present myself? Why is it that when we are dealing with Africa, we do not afford this subject called LGBT, the ability to navigate spaces. Where in Africa, it is true that somebody can go for health service and be discriminated against. It doesn't happen. Why is it that you have to go as such? And this is the question we have to really, really think about. How have we come to frame freedom or LGBT or identity as a matter of being open and everywhere? It doesn't work like that in this country, the United States. It does not. So this is what I'm saying that really let us afford that subject to be. Because that person may be able to know, here is health service. What do I want? I want a vaccine. What is the goal today? I need a vaccine. I'm a Cameroonian. I have my ID card. Vaccination is free because subsidized. I go and get it. That may not be the place to say, oh, you know what, I'm going to go as an LGBT because I know my context. So these are, I don't know, folks who work in. This is part of an education that that is important. And this is the statement like that really makes, give ammunition to the other side. Let us be true and authentic about what is happening. And let us not feel like we have to extrapolate things that may not be true and don't make any sense. There is no country in Africa who limit access to public resources to its citizens. Now, the question provided, there is homophobia. It is a matter of strategy. How should LGBT be entering that space? In which case they should be making a political statement. In other case, in which case they should be retracting. That is how politics happened, including in this country. So there is not such a thing as LGBT everywhere. I wish I could do that in America. And I don't. So please let us afford Africa a wiggle room to be and negotiate because it is a bad negotiation. Negotiate this identity and not always jump on the bad story. And I'm not talking about talking as a person. I'm just saying that since this is a conversation, I think you should just hear it from me in a friendly way rather than from the conservative. Thank you. Yeah, I'm going to give Suzy the last word. But I will say that I hear you. I'm not sure we're on the same page, but I'm also think that there's multiple conversations happening and also about multiple geographies. So I've worked in the public health sector in Latin America and I saw discrimination within the health sector against trans women, for example, and HIV positive people. So I do want to make sure that we also stipulate that we're not just having this conversation about homophobia in Africa. That is not, I think, what I'm here to debate or to solve. But Suzy, I'll give you the last word. We have about a minute. Well, thank you so much. This has been a really rich debate and I hope we can continue in other forums. And I do observe and see the evidence for people in different positions, including along sexuality and gender, sometimes experiencing climate crisis impacts differently because of discrimination around their genders and sexualities, some of which are more visible. For example, if you're transgender, then possibly if you're transgender, then other kinds of differences. But I also see climate change as an existential crisis, which can bring us all together and bring us together with people who are outside our normal realm of coalition. So just for example, I've got a friend in the sex-based rights movement who I've known for decades previously as a feminist ally and now as someone who me and her can disagree, can agree nothing about gender. But we can agree that climate crisis is the priority and that we have to find ways of working together on that. So thanks so much. I've learned a huge amount today from SN and Tucker and everyone else. And thank you. Thank you everyone for joining us today. A great deal of thanks to Suzy, a great deal of thanks to SN. Thank you for joining us, especially SN had to wake up so early to be here. And we may wake up even an hour earlier than necessary. Still apologies for that. I'm sorry, we didn't get to everyone's question that posted in the Q&A. Feel free to get in touch with us via our website. You can find our email addresses. We would love to hear from you if you're also engaged in the space and want to chat. Thank you everybody and have a good rest of your day. Thank you. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.