Across Africa, ‘family values’ conferences have become increasingly visible. These events feature international organisers, local lawmakers and faith leaders and claim to defend the ‘traditional family life’. In some cases, those involved reportedly campaign against the right to abortion or LGBTQI+ rights, raising concern among international and local human rights defenders.

In an interview at the IBA Annual Conference in Toronto in November, Frank Mugisha, Executive Director of Sexual Minorities Uganda, highlighted these events. ‘[Ninety per cent of] the headliners and the speakers are from the West, and they’re coming to talk about our family values, and the only thing they’re speaking about is homosexuality,’ he said.

Santos Cruz – who’s a partner at MDR Advogados in Mozambique – highlights that in many African countries, half of the population doesn’t have access to electricity. ‘So, are we really concerned with the family values that the Global North wants to bring, which [Africans will] probably ignore anyway because they’re not necessarily African family values?’ she asks. There’s a ‘significant disconnect between the real problem of African people – which often is just survival while fighting the most simple diseases – and everything regarding abortion,’ adds Santos Cruz.

Mugisha sees the danger from a different angle. ‘In Uganda, there have been family values conferences in 2023 and 2025, but also smaller events which occur in countries with a Christian background and have a bigger impact because they speak to ordinary individuals,’ he says. ‘The people who attend the [bigger] events are the same [people] who are visible on TV and radio. The message definitely reaches local communities.’ Mugisha tells Global Insight that his organisation was ‘shut down by propaganda that was mainly from people related to the conference.’

In 2023, Uganda’s parliament passed the Anti-Homosexuality Act, the provisions of which include the criminalisation of consensual same-sex conduct with penalties of up to life imprisonment. Article 14 (1) of the Act establishes a duty to report acts of homosexuality even in cases of only ‘reasonable suspicion’. While Mugisha explains that state enforcement is limited and the law is difficult to implement because crimes of homosexuality are hard to prove, he says that its effect is societal. ‘The Anti-Homosexuality Act is being implemented at a very large scale by ordinary Ugandans who are not allowed to rent houses to people because [the renters are] LGBTQI+’, or who refuse to employ people for the same reason.

Uganda’s elections in January reaffirmed President Yoweri Museveni’s decades-long hold on power. The result has renewed international concern over Uganda’s legislative trajectory, including relating to same-sex relations. Mugisha highlights the work of US-based evangelical groups that ‘first came [to Uganda] in 2009’ and are providing ‘technical support’ regarding anti-LGBTQI+ legislation.

Emma Jean-Markin, Co-Chair of the IBA African Regional Forum, says that in her country, Ghana, the dynamic is internal and the family values conferences were prevalent before the more conservative administration entered power in the US. ‘The most vocal time against LGBT rights in Ghana was [in 2024], before Trump came into power,’ she says.

Jean-Markin, who’s also Managing Partner at Markin & Associates, says that communities in Ghana accept same-sex relationships as long as there is no request for legal rights – such as those allowing for same-sex marriage – to be established, as Ghanaians are ‘highly religious and conservative.’

Mugisha highlights that Christianity doesn’t necessarily define African traditions. ‘Many of our traditional practices were disrupted by the Christians when they came here in the first place. In many backgrounds, in Africa, sexuality was fluid. Many African societies [did not put] people in rigid binary boxes of terms like heteronormative versus homosexuality. Sometimes same-sex intimacy was not only socially tolerated but even tied to respected cultural or spiritual roles,’ he explains.

‘Anthropologists have documented how in parts of Uganda’s Buganda kingdom, Nigeria among the Igbo and Yoruba, and among the Zulu in South Africa, spiritual authority could give space for sexual or gender nonconformity,’ adds Mugisha. ‘Similar traditions are noted in Senegal, Ethiopia, and Sudan with the Nubians.’

Jean-Markin highlights the complexity of rights debates. ‘Abortion is normally frowned upon in Ghana, but there are hospitals offering it to vulnerable mothers who feel like they cannot bring up children,’ she explains. ‘However, I’m not sure what the external influence is in this regard. The fact that women have the right to decide on their future comes more from women empowerment conferences than family values conferences.’

Santos Cruz says that any debate imported from the Global North doesn’t make sense while there are still problems related to survival across Africa. ‘The people who speak at these conferences, be it in defense of abortion or LGBTQI+ policy or family values, arrive at the airport, speak and then leave. They do not walk through the reality of these countries,’ she says.

According to Mugisha, foreign partners of African countries should be vocal about human rights violations by adopting a bottom-up approach where local organisations guide the response of international institutions to anti-homsexuality laws. ‘Otherwise, it could be seen as imposing something on a sovereign country,’ he says.

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