International PRIDE Centre: Protection, Rights, Inclusion in Displacement & Emergencies🌈🏳️⚧️

The International PRIDE Centre provides legal & policy analysis, preparedness, & programming tools for aid workers, NGOs, and other emergency response agencies to ensure inclusive programming for LGBTQI+ persons in emergency, humanitarian, and development settings. The PRIDE Centre focuses on countries experience acute and protracted crises, or displacement as a result of regional crises, in which the space for LGBTQI+ rights and expression has become increasingly restricted. CONTEXT. People from LGBTQI+ communities are present in every conflict, natural disaster, mass displacement, and refugee setting. Yet in all these situations, they struggle to access even the most basic assistance. Intensifying this vulnerability, many emergency responses take place in countries with restrictive and violent anti-LGBTQI+ laws and policies. Laws and regulations prohibiting and criminalising individuals with diverse sexual orientation or gender identity and expressions (SOGIE) and those that seek to assist them are rapidly expanding. Even in jurisdictions where these identities are not criminalized, LGBTQI+ needs are overlooked - even excluded - by NGOs, UN Agencies and key actors, including civil society, donors, and labour unions. The result is that SOGIE communities - already among the most vulnerable in the world – are left behind by the very agencies whose entire mandate is to protect and assist the most vulnerable WHERE WE WORK. The International PRIDE Centre is working with civil society in six pilot countries: Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, DRC, Malawi, and Burundi. We also provide legal analysis and recommendations for response agencies for countries with new or proposed anti-LGBTQI+ laws and/or policies, including Niger, Mail, and Burkina Faso. The PRIDE Centre is rooted in a foundation of anti-racism and aid decolonisation across all outputs and operations. We embrace SOGIE communities in all their diversity, inclusive of indigenous understandings of non-CIS sexual identity