Help defend and protect LGBTQ+ rights in Tanzania

Thanks to God, the political environment is changing and the fear for harassment, arbitrary arrest detention and torture is decreasing, it is evident that some people who had gone hiding for the last five years are now returning and socializing again and even the LGBT community is enjoying social media platforms that were blocked. This means much to us and gives a good signal of resuming the advocacy campaigns

Though COVID-19 Pandemic is still a threat to all of us the struggle for equality in Tanzania will not stop, the new political environment combined with your generosity and support gives us the momentum to keep pushing fast towards the achieving our goals.  

 We aren’t ignoring protect our community from COVID-19 but we are trying to utilize the available resources and opportunity to double our impact before it is too late.

In the last five months we were able to:

 Advocacy on behalf of poor vulnerable LGBT community.

Demand decriminalization of Homosexuality in Tanzania.

Run a capacity building project that aim to train 25 LGBT activists equipping them with skills and the knowledge to become local advocates

Document cases of Homophobia and discrimination against LGBT people and learned that members of the LGBT community experienced higher levels of physical, sexual, and emotional violence during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is now in one of our advocacy areas.

Last November we reported that our project named Backlash and resistance that aims to better anticipate, pre-empt and counter resistance and backlash and develop taxonomy of resistance and backlash and to develop a report addressing different forms of resistance and backlash and counter tactics was not completed due to COVID-19 and the financial constraints, it is now time we should continue and complete it.

During the board meeting held this month we agreed that this year LGBT Voice Tanzania is only going to implement few achievable and measurable activities while we work on building a strong team that will be able to move forward next year  

Our work depends on individual voluntary donations because there are no other sources of funding available at the moment that is why we still need your generosity and support in the realization of our mission and goals. We promise to continue working hard till we achieve what we started.

As we all know that COVID-19 affected the world economy and everyone of us which led to a big drop in donations. Last year we raised a total of $6,560 for both general running of the organization including office rent, utilities, internet, communication and emergency support and the projects. This can show how difficult it was to run the organization.

There is still an urgent need for some extra funding because of additional challenges caused by COVID-19 Pandemic. Our annual budgeting $42,000 but it is a real challenge to reach the threshold;

For the moment we need to raise $3,000 for month for office rent and $2,300 cover water, electricity, internet, communication, web hosting and maintenance, for 12 months.

Kindly consider chipping in to help us reach our threshold