FOOD A BASIC - YET AN EMERGENCY: WHERE IS LGBTQI+ FUNDING GOING

Please consider that, across the entire United States, African Human Rights Coalition is the only known LGBTQI+ organization providing direct consistent food-distribution support to LGBTQI+ refugees and asylum seekers in Africa. Though we have provided these services since 2014, we have been doing this as consistent programing since 2019. We have one partner for our program for one such country - Safe Place International - which has been helping by picking up 50% of the cost for the past year. For many of the communities we serve, AHRC is not simply an advocate, we are the only family, and the only source of food these groups receive. This is a stark and painful reality when we look at the broader global LGBTQI+ sector, where major organizations, often with multimillion-dollar budgets and executive salaries that dwarf the cost of feeding an entire refugee community, remain largely U.S.-centric and do not engage in humanitarian food relief. This is not written to begrudge anyone a salary or institutional success, but to raise an essential moral question: How are we, as a global movement, allowing our most vulnerable LGBTQI+ siblings to go hungry when the philanthropic resources of our community are relatively immense? Since the withdrawal of U.S. government support and the end of USAID funding streams that once reached Africa, donor priorities have not shifted to fill the gap. The result is a silent famine among our own LGBTQI+ family. If global LGBTQI+ solidarity means anything, then food, basic human sustenance, must be treated as a shared responsibility, not a forgotten corner of activism. We are in urgent need of support to sustain these life-saving programs. With a modest mailing list and limited reach, we have repeatedly appealed to larger LGBTQI+ organizations to help amplify our message yet those requests have gone unanswered. This silence does not reflect a lack of compassion, but rather a structural reality: what is often described as a “global movement” is, in practice, a constellation of stand-alone organizations operating within their own silos. The result is that communities in crisis, especially LGBTQI+ refugees in Africa, fall through the cracks.

Nourishment Is Survival: Why Your Support Matters Now

Across transit shelters, informal safe houses, and refugee camps in several African countries, LGBTQI+ refugees depend almost entirely on the African Human Rights Coalition's rations to survive.  We do not have enough to continue past January 31, 2026. These refugees are forcibly displaced by criminalization, violence, and state-sponsored persecution — and because they are LGBTQI+, they face additional barriers to accessing food distributions, employment, and community resources in hostile host countries and even within the protection environments such as camps themselves.

African Human Rights Coalition (AHRC) currently supports LGBTQI+ refugee communities in several African countries with monthly food distributions. The wait list and growing need, overwhelming. The ration is painfully simple: maize or wheat flour, rice, cooking oil, sugar, and salt — and occasionally dish soap. These staples keep people alive, but they do not meet minimum nutritional needs for a month. By the third week, food often runs out. By the fourth week, hunger becomes chronic.

ONE MONTH RATION PER PERSON. Added Women's Products.

One AHRC Refugee Ambassador who leads a distribution prohgram explained it this way:

"Every month, we receive a basic ration: rice, sugar, cooking oil, wheat flour, and salt. Occasionally, dishwashing liquid is included. While we are deeply grateful for this support, it’s important to share that these items are not enough to sustain a person for an entire month. We rarely have access to nutrient-rich foods like vegetables, meat, or eggs. Without these, it’s impossible to maintain a balanced diet, and many of us struggle with fatigue, poor health, and emotional stress. Sourcing food from outside is nearly impossible due to lack of income and limited access to affordable suppliers. This is the daily reality we live with — and it’s why your support matters so deeply."

This is where your support makes a transformative difference. However even this is threatened as we do not have enough funds to take us beyond January 31, 2026.

What Your Donation Provides: $12 per month feeds one refugee with essential staples. $24 per month ensures that same person receives eggs, vegetables, and additional nutrition, preventing malnutrition and improving mental and physical health.

Why this work is essential

• Refugee-hosting countries face ration cuts due to global funding shortages.

• LGBTQI+ refugees face discrimination that limits access to shared food distributions.

• Most have no income, no legal pathways to work, and no safe alternatives.

• Some resort to dangerous sex-work to survive.
  

Your contribution does more than feed a person.

It restores health, dignity, and hope. It ensures that month after month, no one is left hungry or forgotten.

When Survival Becomes a Diet: The Daily Rations of Refugees

In refugee settlements across Africa, food is not a matter of choice, culture, or nourishment—it is a matter of survival. For thousands of forcibly displaced people LGBTQI+ refugees fleeing criminalization and violence in nearby countries, the “diet” is not really a diet at all. It is a ration: a monthly allotment of maize flour, a small measure of cooking oil, and a modest portion of sugar. These three items—maize meal, oil, sugar—constitute breakfast, lunch, and dinner, repeated day after day, month after month.

There is no variety, no vegetables, no protein, no fresh produce. The body learns this monotony; the spirit fights it. But both grow weary. By the final days of the month, hunger is no longer episodic. It is chronic.  Then, the next month arrives. And the cycle begins again.

Maize flour is a heavy starch. It fills the stomach but starves the body. Without proteins, vitamins, and minerals, refugees face a slow erosion of health: anemia, weakened immune systems, chronic fatigue, stunted growth in children, and heightened vulnerability to infections. For LGBTQI+ refugees, already living under layered stress—the trauma of displacement, the fear of reprisal, the stigma from within the camp—poor nutrition compounds mental and physical deterioration.

Oil offers calories but no balance. Sugar provides momentary energy but accelerates exhaustion. The monotony itself becomes an affliction, stripping meals of pleasure, cultural identity, and psychological normalcy.

The international humanitarian system is stretched thin, but the effect on refugees is intimate and immediate. In Refugee settlements—like the sprawling Meheba Refugee Settlement or Mantapala along the DRC border—the food pipeline often depends on fluctuating funding and global emergencies elsewhere. When crises erupt in other regions, rations shrink  everywhere else.

People’s lives are recalculated according to donor budgets.

It is difficult to overstate what this means to a community. Food becomes the measure of dignity. The absence of food becomes the measure of abandonment. Refugees internalize the message: their survival is conditional, their lives negotiable.

Voices From the Ground

A young Congolese lesbian woman described it this way:“Every meal is the same. You eat it not because you are hungry, but because if you don’t eat it now, there will be none later.”

A gay Ugandan man put it even more plainly:“The ration runs out before the month runs out. When the food is finished, we hide. We are too weak to walk around. We sleep until the next distribution.”

These testimonies are not merely stories—they are indictments of a system that keeps people alive but not living.

Humanitarian Needs Outpacing Humanitarian Funding

WFP and UNHCR have repeatedly warned of food ration cuts across multiple African refugee-hosting countries. Years of reduced contributions from donor states mean that rations have dropped to 60% or even 40% of minimum recommended needs. That means smaller maize allocations, thinner oil allowances, and no added nutritional supplements unless targeted for children or pregnant women.

In practice, this means perpetual hunger.

Survival Is Not Enough

Refugees do not ask for luxury. They ask for enough food to sustain a body through a month; for the dignity of a balanced meal; for the stability that allows them to focus on rebuilding their lives—not simply enduring them.

Food is a human right. But in the camp, food is a ration ticket.

Until the international community invests in stable, predictable, and adequate support; until host governments meaningfully incorporate refugees into food security and livelihood programs; until global actors recognize that survival cannot be the ceiling of humanitarian response—refugees will continue to live on the brink of hunger, sustained only by maize flour, oil, and sugar.

Month after month.

DONATIONS: HERE Please note the donation choice of one time or monthly contributions: For Corporate giving and briefings please contact Melanie Nathan - nathan@africanHRC.org and commissionermnathan@gmail.com