Post 2020, ex-Trump officials have worked through NGOs to undermine abortion and LGBTQ rights in Africa, preparing the ground for his re-election

Despite Donald Trump’s electoral defeat as US president in 2020, his ex-officials and allies have never stopped campaigning for African countries to prevent abortion and LGBTQ rights  – in league with some of the most right-wing countries on the planet, including Russia and Hungary.

If Trump is re-elected on 5 November, he is likely to entrench opposition to abortion as a key pillar of US foreign aid. Project 2025, the controversial conservative blueprint for a Trump victory written primarily by his former officials, proposes that all US aid including humanitarian assistance, is conditional on the rejection of abortion.

“Proposed measures for USAID [US Agency for International Development] include a significant restructuring, and reduction of budget, the removal of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and dismantling of the apparatus that supports gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights,” notes researcher Malayah Harper in an analysis of Project 2025.

‘Sending people to their deaths’

“The return of Trump, at a time when nationalist African presidents are also prosecuting women and queer people, means sending these groups to their death,” observes Saoyo Tabitha Griffith, a Kenyan high court lawyer and women’s rights activist.

“This is not alarmist. It is purely informed by the observation of past patterns,” she tells Health Policy Watch.

One of Trump’s first presidential actions in 2017 was to prohibit foreign NGOs from receiving US government funding for health if they “provided, promoted, or discussed” abortion – known as the Expanded Global Gag Rule (GGR). 

Many family planning organisations lost their funding and women lost access to contraception in some of the continent’s poorest countries such as Madagascar and Ethiopia – ironically contributing to more unplanned pregnancies.

Banning abortion has never stopped it

But abortion bans have never stopped women and girls from trying to end unwanted pregnancies. It has simply driven them to unsafe providers whose methods often maim and even kill them.

Approximately 6.2 million women and girls had abortions in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2019, and the region has the highest rate of unplanned pregnancies and abortion-related deaths in the world – 185 maternal deaths per 100,000 abortions, according to  Guttmacher.

When Trump was elected, Griffith was deputy head of the Kenya Legal and Ethical Issues Network on HIV and AIDS (KELIN) which works on HIV and women’s issues.

“After the Expanded Gag Rule, we saw the deaths of sex workers. We saw the deaths of women who needed safe abortions. People died because service delivery programmes shut down,” she said.

Trump’s administration also cut funding to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), effectively shrinking the budget of the global sexual and reproductive health agency by around 7%. This affected the provision of maternal and reproductive health services throughout the world – particularly in humanitarian settings.

Trump also froze the US contributions to the World Health Organization (WHO) in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2023, Republican congressional lobbying even put the brakes on the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), claiming – incorrectly – that some grant recipients were promoting abortion. As a result of the right-wing lobby, PEPFAR projects now receive yearly budgets instead of five-year funding.

Ex-Trump officials prepare ground for his re-election

While legal abortion is out of the reach of most African women and girls, 19 African countries have eased access since 1994 – mostly in an attempt to reduce the maternal deaths caused by unsafe abortions.

But US groups have stoked opposition to easing abortion access in Africa, led most recently by Valerie Huber, the Trump-era Special Representative for Global Women’s Health, and Alma Golden, ex-Assistant Administrator for Global Health at USAID.

Huber was the architect of an anti-abortion pact, the Geneva Consensus Declaration (GCD), adopted in the dying weeks of Trump’s rule in October 2020 with the support of an array of global human-rights polecats such as Iraq, Uganda, Belarus and Sudan.

The GCD also promotes “the natural family” – primarly aimed at removing any recognition of the existence of  LGBTQ people.

When Biden withdrew the US from the GCD in 2020, Hungary took over the secretariat. However, Trump has confirmed that the US will rejoin the pact if he is elected “to reject the globalist claim of an international right to abortion”.

“Under my leadership, the United States will also rejoin the Geneva Consensus Declaration, created by my administration and signed by 36 nations, to reject the globalist claim of an international right to abortion.” pic.twitter.com/1r4R4l23Pg

— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) September 20, 2023

After Trump’s defeat, Huber and Golden launched an NGO called the Institute for Women’s Health (IWH) in 2021, to seek support for the GCD. The IWH is on Project 2025’s advisory board. Its Africa coordinator is Phillip Sayuni, a Ugandan anti-gay pastor, while its international programmes director, Anita Mpambara Cox, is a Ugandan American who sought election as a  Republican Senator in 2022.

In the past year, the IWH has persuaded Burundi and Chad, countries with poor human rights records, to sign the GCD. Burundi only allow abortion to save the life of a pregnant woman, not even allowing it in cases of rape and incest. Women who have abortions face prison sentences. The military dictatorship in Chad allows abortions to save a woman’s life and in cases of rape and incest.

Since forming IWH, Huber has courted several right wing African governments, including Sudan, South Sudan, Mali, Burkino Faso and Tanzania, but her closest links are with the Ugandan government.

Ms. Valerie Huber, President and C E O of the prestigious Institute for Women’s Health, headquartered in Washington, D.C. is currently visiting Burundi since this sunday May, 5 2024. She traveled with her Executive Operator for Africa Mr Philip. pic.twitter.com/1fmShe0TCP

— OPDD-Burundi (@OPDD_Burundi) May 5, 2024

Support from US conservative Christian groups

Supporting Huber’s anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ crusade is a phalanx of conservative US NGOs active in Africa, particularly Family Watch International (FWI), headed by conservative Mormon Sharon Slater. FWI has been pushing the same agenda in Africa for over 20 years, and Slater and Huber both work closely with Ugandan First Lady Janet Museveni.

Several of these US groups also oppose contraception and sex education for school children known as “comprehensive sexuality education”.

The African spending of 17 conservative US Christian organisations known for opposing sexual and reproductive rights, including FWI, almost doubled after Trump’s 2020 defeat. FWI’s spending increased by 495%, albeit off a low base.

The 17 groups spent about $16.5 million in Africa between 2019 and 2022, with almost a third ($5.2 million) in 2022, the year after Biden took office, according to the Institute for Journalism and Social Change (IJSC). 

Importing US anti-LGBTQ laws

A group of US anti-rights groups have worked with conservative African politicians for decades to encourage laws that crack down on the very existence of LGBTQ people across the continent. 

In the past year, Uganda and Ghana have passed draconian anti-LGBTQ laws with the encouragement of these US groups, particularly FWI.

FWI was one of the driving forces behind the recent Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Family Values and Sovereignty, which also received a $300,000 boost from the Russian government, according to a recent Wall Street Journal exposé. 

The conference also featured speakers who attacked routine vaccination campaigns and the World Health Organization (WHO), as previously exposed by Health Policy Watch.

However, its main agenda was to galvanise support from politicians across Africa for anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion legislation.

The government of Kenyan President William Ruto, the country’s first evangelical leader, is considering “family values” laws to crack down on LGBTQ people and even make divorce more difficult. 

Copycat laws from US

Kenyan LGBTQ activist Āryā Jeipea Karijo says that parts of her country’s anti-LGBTQ Bill are “a direct copy” of US anti-transgender bills. 

Two concerns in the Bill – transgender people’s access to bathrooms and minors transitioning – “are not contextual to Kenya’s state of access to water as well as to meeting healthcare needs of transgender people”, Karijo says.

Kenya is struggling to provide adequate toilets in many schools and there is very little opportunity for adults to transition, let alone minors, she explains to Health Policy Watch.

“A side-by-side reading of US anti-transgender legislation and sections of the anti-LGBTQ laws that have been passed in Ghana, Uganda, and are proposed for Kenya, show that the authors are the same, and they are definitely not from the continent,” adds Karijo.

Meanwhile, Namibian LGBTQ activist Omar van Reenen notes that “anti-rights groups in the US share resources, strategies and rhetoric internationally”.

“The transnational exchange of anti-rights ideologies imported from American evangelical groups and NGOs like Family Watch International are alive and well,” said Van Reenen in a recent interview with the journal, Transcript.

Griffith sounds a grim warning if Trump wins the US election: “African women and LGBTQ people must anticipate that Trump’s return will re-ignite an ideological war with real and physical consequences on their bodies.

“Issues such as contraceptives, surrogacy, single parenting, safe abortion, HPV vaccines and sexual orientation are all going to be contested, not through science and data but by conspiracies and misinformation.”

Image Credits: IJSC.