Why should Africans kowtow to an LGBTQI+ agenda to get life-saving foreign aid?

Aug 25, 2023 by Dave Doveton

By Mathew Otieno, Mercator.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) recently published its first policy on inclusive development, which seems set to condition aid on compliance with an LGBTQI+ agenda.

The new policy, according to the agency, “reiterates, guides, and reinforces USAID’s commitment, to championing LGBTQI+ inclusive development and the human rights of LGBTQI+ people.”

The document is a goldmine of the sort of meaningless drivel that has come to define the sector. It ranges from fluffy pandering, like the claim that “LGBTQI+ movements are driven by brave, smart, strategic, passionate, innovative, and resilient leaders in every region” to the downright laughable, like “an increase in LGBTQI+ persons’ legal rights is associated with an increase in real gross domestic product per capita of approximately $2,000.”

Part of me wanted to dismiss the new policy as a harmless bone tossed to satisfy the LGBT lobby’s constant yapping for attention. What’s a piece of paper among friends, after all?

But USAID is America’s main foreign aid agency. It is responsible for half of the country’s annual foreign development and humanitarian assistance (almost US$40 billion in 2022 alone) and operates in almost all African countries. When it coughs, as the saying goes, the aid industry catches pneumonia.

Furthermore, at the beginning of its term, the Biden administration pledged, to much consternation, to promote exactly this kind of culturally insensitive and subversive foreign policy, giving the LGBTQI+ agenda pride of place. This policy, therefore, is neither isolated nor harmless; it is part of a grand scheme.

The question, then, is what this means for African countries that annually benefit from American aid. Though very few have formally protested the policy, perhaps because it hasn’t been heavily promoted just yet, it is undoubtedly opposed to their cultural sensibilities and laws.

America has the right to set its own conditions for its humanitarian assistance. It is America’s money, and America gets to decide to whom it goes. Recipients, if they really want it, get little wiggle room around such conditions, save for duplicity.

Read here.