External Actors Pressing ‘Family Values’ in Africa Backing Outside Political Agendas Carries a Human Rights Cost

[Larissa Kojoue is a researcher at the LGBT division with Human Rights Watch]

Legislation that strips people of their rights is gaining momentum across Africa, in the name of “African Family Values” and “Sovereignty.” It is not driven by popular demands, but rather because domestic actors find it politically rewarding, and external forces find the African continent a strategic arena to advance a coordinated agenda of exclusion and discrimination.

At the center of this campaign are the African Inter-Parliamentary Conferences on Family Values and Sovereignty. Backed by international organizations such as Family Watch International, based in the US, and Christian Council International, based in Europe, these conferences function as political platforms that translate a political agenda aiming to install model legislation designed to erode, deny and destroy binding human rights obligations. 

The strategy is deliberate. The conferences build cross-religious coalitions, manufacture a sense of continental consensus, and provide both financial and logistical support for national legislative campaigns. The continent should resist being conscripted into external actors’ culture wars. 

Ghana offers a vivid example of how this mechanism operates. The latest conference organized from June 3 to 6 in Accra was hosted by African Christian Professionals Forum and brought together about three hundred political leaders, parliamentarians, religious leaders, and faith-based advocates from over 20 countries across the continent and abroad. The main agenda item was the draft of the African Charter on Family, Sovereignty and Values, which organizers aimed to finalize and forward to the African Union for consideration.

By convening actors from political, legal, economic and religious spheres, the conference illustrated how ideas, resources, and mobilization strategies circulate across national borders, allowing broader anti-rights movements, including networks linked to US conservative organizations, to shape and reinforce locally rooted anti-rights campaigns against lesbian, gay, bisexual and Trans individuals (LGBT).

Ghana’s role as host, following Uganda, and the participation of high-ranking officials in both the opening and closing sessions, underscore the country’s growing importance as a regional hub where interfaith coalitions promote legislative agendas that prioritize religious frameworks over a rights-based framework on issues related to family, women’s rights, reproductive rights, LGBT rights and education. A few days before the conference opened in Accra, the Ghanaian Parliament accelerated the adoption of the Human Rights and Family Values Bill, also known as the anti-LGBT bill. Under the bill, identifying as LGBT or queer would be punished by up to three years in prison. There is a “duty to report” prohibited acts to police, and anyone who identifies as an ally could also face a prison sentence.

The Anti-LGBT bill traces its origin directly to the World Congress of Families (WCF), organized in Accra in November 2019. The WCF operates as the primary project of the International Organization for the Family (IOF), the US based conservative group that also has  far-right ties in Europe. The organization’s mission is to unite and equip leaders worldwide to promote the “natural family.”

The World Congress of families event organized in Accra was supported by many of the same foreign conservative actors and organizations that have been involved in anti-LGBT campaigns in countries such as Uganda, Kenya, Italy, Hungary or Russia. Among the speakers was Sharon Slater, president of Family Watch International (FWI), which works to promote and protect the “natural” family as the fundamental unit of society. The event was hosted by an umbrella group called the National Coalition for Proper Human Sexual Rights and Family Values, whose members officially introduced an earlier version of the bill with a similar name in 2021. A few months later, Sam Dzata George, a prominent sponsor of the bill, attended the “African Family Policy Conference” in Utah, which was organized by Family Watch International.

During the conference in Accra, Theresa Okafor the WCF’s Africa regional representative and organizer of the first WCF in Africa in Nigeria in 2009, introduced a new acronym in her opening remarks: G.H.A.N.A, which she said stood for God Has a New Africa. While the acronym framed Africa as a new center of resistance to a morally decadent Western culture, it also exposed a contradiction.

The Conference itself depended heavily on alliances with Western conservative networks whose leading political allies, including figures like Viktor Orban in Hungary and Matteo Salvini in Italy, have built campaigns against migrant rights in the name of protecting national identity and demographic continuity. The “African values” and “sovereignty” arguments are just part of a transnational conservative project shaped by actors and agenda that extend well beyond the continent.

Ghana is not an isolated case. Previous editions of the Conference organized between 2023 and 2025 in Entebbe, Uganda, featured speakers and participants who promoted Uganda’s Anti Homosexuality Act (AHA) as a model framework to introduce “family protection” legislation to other African countries. The AHA was passed ten days before the first “African Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Family Values and Sovereignty”. After the first Conference in Entebbe in 2023, Kenyan lawmakers who attended, pushed for a tougher law against same sex conduct, disguised as a Family Protection Bill.

Instead of protecting families, Uganda’s law has unleashed abuses against LGBT people, their families, and their supporters in Uganda. It has also created a strong disincentive for the general public and key populations to access HIV testing, treatment, and prevention services.

UNAIDS warned that the legislation would threaten Uganda’s progress toward ending AIDS by 2030. Similar consequences have also been documented with a similar, recent law in Senegal.

Beyond national legislation, these conferences are also advancing a more ambitious instrument, an African Charter of Family Sovereign and Values. The draft charter promotes the concept of family as a unit only formed by marriage between a man, a woman and their children, with strict hierarchical roles. It rejects reference to sexual and reproductive health and rights, calls for eliminating comprehensive sexuality education, and opposes abortion under any circumstances.

The charter also promotes resistance to international human rights norms and mechanisms that support gender equality, bodily autonomy, and the rights of LGBT persons.

While framed as an authentic expression of African values, many of the ideas and policy prescriptions contained in the draft charter closely mirror narratives that have long been promoted by US Christian conservative organizations and transnational anti-rights networks.

These include defining the family exclusively as a union between a man and a woman, opposing recognition of LGBT rights, rejecting abortion and sexual and reproductive health and rights, resisting comprehensive sexuality education, and portraying “gender ideology” as a threat to children, religion, and national sovereignty. Such themes have been central to the advocacy of organizations including Family Watch International and the World Congress of Families.

The proposed charter erases Africa’s rich diversity of families, denies women and girls their bodily autonomy, exposes civil society and human rights defenders to prosecution and deprives children of their right to access evidence-based health information.

This so called “Family Values” charter directly clashes with several regional binding treaties that African states have themselves independently developed and adopted under the auspices of the African Union, including the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights (1981), the Maputo Protocol (2003) on the rights of women in Africa and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (1990). Despite its ostensibly rights affirming language, the “Family Values” charter challenges the foundational architecture of regional and international human rights law.

Dressed in apparent anti-colonial language, these transnational meetings invoke “sovereignty” and “rights” while in reality seeking to strip both from millions of Africans across the continent. The conference organizers target parliaments and constitutional processes, draft model legislation that explicitly encourages and fuels persecution of individuals and even the death penalty simply for who they are or who they love. Attending legislators return home with a model bill in hand and introduce it in their parliament, shifting the focus away from government failures. 

Beyond pushing for new, anti-rights legislation, these conferences amplify moral panic and create a sense of urgency. They fuel and sustain a social climate in which violence and hate are normalized and even encouraged. The rights of LGBT people in Ghana and across the region are already heavily restricted. 

African lawmakers have the duty to ensure that laws and policies they create or support do not violate rights such as freedom of expression and assembly, equality, right to privacy or due process; rights in African treaties that they have drafted and ratified.  Legislation that criminalizes identity, silences speech, restricts assembly, or strips Africans of equal protection is not a defense of African values. It is a breach of the legal obligations their governments have ratified and are internationally accountable for.

[Photo by Damian Patkowski on Unsplash]