Above photo: UmaUma Collective holds a poli-ed activity with flower arranging lessons in February 2025. UmaUma Collective.
One of the 26 executive orders Donald Trump signed on the first day of his presidency was a 90-day pause on foreign aid, which he said is often “not aligned with American interests”.
The subsequent suspension of overseas aid programmes has hit vulnerable communities around the world, with LGBTIQ+ organisations in the Global South among the worst affected. But three East African queer mutual aid groups were well-prepared for this scenario, and have a model that could help organisations reeling from Trump’s actions.
Since their inception, The Trans and Queer Fund and UmaUma Buy Nothing group, both based in Kenya, and an untitled queer collective in Uganda have organised themselves to be independent from foreign donors, which they say do not understand the realities of the communities they serve.
While foreign donors typically give aid for specific projects, these groups say the interventions their communities need often cannot be neatly tied to a project. Instead, they must remain flexible and able to act quickly if an LGBTIQ person suddenly becomes unhoused or faces food insecurity, financial struggles or social isolation.
Another problem with foreign aid is that donors often require the recipients to be legally registered in the countries where they work. This is often impossible in the case of groups supporting queer communities, either because being LGBTIQ is criminalised, as in Uganda, or could render them social pariahs. Some 27% of trans organisations globally are unregistered, according to research published last year by the Global Philanthropy Project (GPP), a US-based network of international funders and grantees campaigning to expand funding for LGBTIQ movements globally.
Foreign donors also typically demand that the groups they fund track how their money is being spent through labour-intensive reporting procedures, which the groups often do not have the manpower to satisfy.
“International aid is often tied to visibility. Donors want to see a direct impact from their money, rather than supporting systems they don’t control,” Eshban Kwesiga of the Global Fund for Community Foundations, an organisation that focuses solely on growing community philanthropy globally, told openDemocracy.
This dependency, he added, not only “undermines local agency” but also reinforces harmful cycles of reliance on foreign aid. This is not only because aid can lead to government corruption or reduce the incentive for a government to work to support its own people, but also because it hands funders – who are usually in the Global North – control over what causes should be funded on the ground in the Global South.
Tackling food security and homelessness is a pressing need for economically disadvantaged queer people, yet less than 1% of global funding for queer organisations in Africa is earmarked for these causes, according to a 2024 report by the GPP. Around 9% goes towards the ‘economic wellbeing’ of LGBTIQ communities, the report found, while 64% is dedicated to long-view work, such as the decriminalisation of queerness or the protection of sexual and reproductive rights.
What East African Mutual Aid Groups Are Doing Differently
The three East African mutual aid groups openDemocracy has spoken to believe it is more important to have money available to respond to their communities’ present needs. In doing so, they offer a fresh example of what communal care looks like.
Queer Kenyans are particularly vulnerable to financial insecurity in a time where the cost of living has risen exponentially. The community is particularly hard hit because they face higher rates of unemployment and widespread workplace discrimination, including lower wages due to social homophobia. In 2019, a Kenyan high court declined to decriminalise gay sex, finding that the law did not violate LGBTIQ Kenyans’ rights to equality and freedom from discrimination.
The Trans and Queer Fund (TQF) works to support queer Kenyans who are struggling financially and operates on a simple but powerful premise: redistribution. The fund, which was started at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, redirects resources from community members and allies with food and money to spare to those who don’t, with minimal bureaucracy.
Every month for the past five years, TQF has provided food, paid rent and other bills, and sent emergency cash to an average of 80 queer Kenyans a month, who are suffering the brunt of worsening economic conditions and increased queerphobia. The group receives requests for help from people across the country and even some from neighbouring Uganda.
“An important part for us was to reduce red tape and make the process of giving more dignified. It is trusting people to determine what their needs are,” said Mumbi Kanyogo from TQF.
TQF also regularly raises donations via its social media platforms. In 2023, it raised over 100,000 Kenyan shillings ($720) for Ray, who was ill and facing homelessness alongside her trans partner. “You can’t turn to the family that rejected you,” Ray told openDemocracy.
“The only community that came through was the TQF,” she added.
Queer collective UmaUma is also working to support LGBTIQ+ Kenyans. It runs a ‘buy nothing’ WhatsApp group with over 170 queer members, which operates on the principle that one should not buy something that someone else has but doesn’t need.
Donations have ranged from sewing machines to concert tickets and free veterinary consultations for members. Despite not formally being a partner of the global Buy Nothing initiative, the group has adopted this philosophy and strives to reduce over-consumption and environmental abuse by gifting and reusing unwanted goods and services.
“It’s not barter trade where we equate things to their market value,” said Keeshi, one of UmaUma’s co-founders. “It’s gifting. If one has something in excess, they give it away.”
UmaUma also works to get food to LGBTIQ+ Kenyans who need it. As it may not be safe for queer people to be seen regularly arriving at trans and other queer people’s homes, members of the group run shelves around Nairobi, where people can drop off or pick up food. They also teach skills such as foraging and farming in small spaces, such as on a balcony.
The collective is struggling to win funding to continue its work, having made more than seven applications over the past year without success. UmaUma is open about its community-centered, egalitarian approach in its applications, which it suspects may have put some funders off.
But they’re not dissuaded. “We don’t want to be the kind of group that says that because there’s no funding, then we can’t do anything,” said Keeshi. “We would be repeating the patterns we want to run away from.”
Meanwhile, in Uganda, queer people face similar financial struggles with one of the world’s harshest anti-gay laws in place and with national poverty at 30%, according to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics’ most recent 2019/20 figures.
It was against this backdrop that Mugisha, a trans organiser, and his partner Mabel began sharing their residence with LGBTIQ people who needed a temporary place to stay in 2021.
Within two years, their eight-bedroom home, whose location openDemocracy is not naming for their safety, was providing temporary shelter to an average of a dozen queer people each month. Many of the residents had lost housing due to unemployment, family rejection, or police raids on NGO-run shelters.
The residents shared everything, including meals. Other community members donated clothing and foodstuff, and they held small birthday parties and bonfire conversations on the weekends. There was a garden, too, where they raised rabbits and chickens and grew beans, cassava, and tomatoes.
There were also film screenings, including one in June 2023, a few weeks after the Anti-Homosexuality Act was passed into law. The act criminalised such gatherings, but over 50 queer people still showed up – many of whom had never been in such a space before. “We still had joy in a time of panic,” said Mabel in an interview with openDemocracy last week.
Until last October, Mugisha and Mabel mostly used their salaries to support the collective’s work. Then Mabel lost her job, and the financial cost of the residence became untenable, forcing the residence to close – for now.
While there are still some NGO-run shelters that provide essential safe housing for queer people who otherwise have nowhere to turn, these often do not have the resources for any social activities and do not offer the same sense of community that the collective did.
“Ours was not just a shelter. It was a space where people could feel that they’re loved and cared for, and there was time for them to become their better selves,” said Mugisha.
How The Mutual Aid Groups Alternatively Fundraise
These mutual aid groups are not without challenges – particularly a lack of funding. To fundraise locally, TQF has turned to political education, holding regular book discussions on queer liberation in Africa. Ethical community-building requires a solid critique of imperialism and capitalism, a constant conversation amongst the group, according to Kanyogo.
“Trying to forge the narrative of class solidarity has been a really big way for us to sort of motivate people to contribute over the last five years,” she added. In 2024, the fund raised an average of $2,000 a month from local donations, which is insufficient to meet the requests the group receives.
In Uganda, local fundraising has been challenging – partly due to high rates of urban poverty amongst prospective donors. But donations of foodstuff, mattresses, and furniture have been abundant. While Mugisha still hopes to reopen the collective in the future, for now he and his team continue to run a community pantry through financial and material donations and plan to provide therapeutic care for frontline queer organisers this year.
The groups have already inspired others, too. One former resident at Mugisha collective, a trans woman called Nina, called her time there “transformative”. She had moved into the residence in 2022, after Mugisha helped her to leave a mental health institution that her family had forced her into for so-called ‘conversion therapy’.
Today, Nina plans to pay the help she received from Mugisha forward. She has been researching sustainable housing models for queer people in Uganda, and wants to establish an eco-communal village and network of self-contained container units that would allow residents both autonomy and communal support.
The model, she hopes, could address the high rates of homelessness among queer Ugandans while also creating a self-sustaining funding structure where residents grow their own food and operate small businesses on the property.