(Bloomberg) -- US conservative groups have significantly increased spending in Africa amid a wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation across the continent.
The revelations were published by the Amsterdam-based Institute for Journalism and Social Change, which found that 17 American groups spent $5.2 million in 2022, up 47% from 2019, according to an analysis of the most recent US tax filings.
The organizations spent a combined $16.5 million in Africa from 2019 to 2022, the report’s authors said.
It may be that “they recognize they have lost the cultural wars at home and see Africa as the new frontier,” Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah, a director at the institute, said in an interview in the Ghanaian capital, Accra.
The surge in spending came as countries across Africa, including Uganda, Kenya and Ghana, attempted to introduce legislation targeting LGBTQ people. Meanwhile, the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 emboldened anti-abortion campaigners in Nigeria to try and restrict access in the country.
The report looked at spending in Africa by groups including:
- The Fellowship Foundation, which paid for Representative Tim Walberg to deliver a speech at a 2023 event attended by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, where the Michigan lawmaker urged the country to “stand firm” on anti-LGBTQ legislation prescribing punishments that include the death sentence.
- Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian group that advocates for legislation against abortion and opposes sexual rights.
- Leadership Institute, which trains conservatives to influence public policy, and is a Project 2025 advisory board member.
The Heritage Foundation, which spearheaded Project 2025, a detailed plan crafted by some of Donald Trump’s closest White House advisers, reported about $8,000 spent in Africa over the four-year period without detailing where the money is allocated. The conservative platform has been disavowed by the former president and proposes a slew of conservative policies if Trump defeats Kamala Harris in the US presidential election.
Alliance Defending Freedom said its spending wasn’t used to fund abortion or sexual-rights issues from 2019 to 2022 — the period of the report. “The grants we have supported in Africa focus on the persecution of Christians and other religious minorities,” a spokesperson for ADF International said.
The Fellowship Foundation, Leadership Institute and Heritage Foundation didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“The dramatic increase in spending in Africa by these US groups demonstrates the need for more regular and ongoing monitoring,” Sekyiamah and her co-author Claire Provost said in the report.
The actual spending by conservative groups in Africa is likely much higher, they said, though churches and church associations aren’t required to provide the same filings as other groups. Some financial investments may also be exempt from being reported, the authors said. The beneficiary countries and the purpose of the funding weren’t specified either.
The surge in overall spending coincides with a global institutional push to be more explicit about recognizing LGBTQ communities as marginalized groups.
The World Bank and the European Union, through its 2023 Samoa Agreement with 79 countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific, have updated their standards to include language on the need to protect sexual and gender minorities from discrimination.
But Christian-linked groups have influenced a wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation in Africa, said Sekyiamah, noting that some of the continent’s most progressive countries risk “falling to fundamentalist agendas.”
In Ghana, a bill that calls for anyone who identifies as LGBTQ to be jailed for as many as three years is awaiting presidential assent before it becoms law. Anyone who fails to report someone they know is LGBTQ would also be punishable. In East Africa, Kenya is considering legislation that would further criminalize homosexuality.
Even South Africa, where same-sex couples can get married, “is very much struggling to hold the line,” she said. Thirteen people were killed in suspected hate crimes this year alone, the South African organization OUT LGBT Well-being said in a statement last week.
(Adds background on Ghana and Kenya in penultimate paragraph)
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