QAYN was founded in response to the homo-patriarchy of gay male practices that marginalized the leadership and issues of queer women in mixed organizing spaces in the then-nascent LGBTQ movement in West Africa and has grown from our founder Mariam Armisen’s experiences launching and leading what was then called the Queer African Youth Networking Center into an autonomous movement led by lesbians, queer women, trans* and gender non-confirming young activists.

QAYN begun as a virtual platform that gathered and disseminated accurate, relevant information on sexual orientation and identity to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) West African youth. In late 2010, to introduce the initiative on the ground, we organized a forum in Lagos, Nigeria, in collaboration with our first network member, Queer Alliance Nigeria. This forum brought together over 50 young LGBTQ Nigerians to help shape our focus and priorities. The feedback from participants enabled QAYN to refine her strategic direction and develop from a virtual space to a network of individuals and organizations across West Africa.

Further needs assessments were conducted with communities of lesbian, bisexual, queer women and women who have sex with women (LBQWSW) in Burkina Faso, Ghana and Nigeria. Focus group discussions and individual interviews were designed to explore lived realities at the individual level and in particular the challenges that young emerging leaders faced in initiating collective action. The resulting report, Struggling Alone: The Lived Realities of Women who have Sex with Women in Burkina Faso, Ghana and Nigeria, was the first of its kind and revealed the harsh and complex realities queer West African women experience in all aspects of their lives, including the challenges they face in LGBTQ organizing space. Combined with QAYN’s own experience of organizing, this research affirmed the urgency of supporting and strengthening queer women’s leadership and facilitating collective action grounded in the understanding that large-scale social change comes from coordinated collective efforts more than the isolated efforts of individuals and organizations.

After two years of organizing and learning, we intensified our focus on Francophone West African countries and Cameroon in Central Africa. For Francophone activists, the language barrier coupled with persistent lack of resources to support the nascent movement has contributed to isolating our efforts and limiting our access to networking platforms and capacity-building opportunities. As a result, the work of Francophone LGBTQ activists remains largely underground and invisible to regional and international LGBTQ movements. With little exposure to broader movements or opportunities to connect with them, the actions of Francophone activists, particularly those led by queer women, have remained small in scope and reach and it is not uncommon that activists are unaware of the work of other groups even in their own country.

We conceptualized a political education and solidarity space – Activist School – to facilitate leadership and consciousness-raising among young queer women and gender non-confirming activists grounded in a strong analysis of feminism, gender and sexuality and sensitive to the contexts of West Africa. From eight activists at our 1^st Activist School in 2012, we had 33 during the latest edition in 2016.

Combining political education with seed funds, we supported the initial organizing efforts by alumni of the 1^st Activist School and included a new initiative in Yaoundé, Cameroon. We published another groundbreaking report, Between Us.The Complexities of Lesbian, Bisexual and Queer Women’s Organizing in Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa, a case study that gave unprecedented insights into the nature, capacity and challenges of nascent queer women-led initiatives. We also conducted a country visit to Cameroon, Senegal and Togo to meet our members and provide technical support to strengthen the implementation of their initial activities.

In Benin and Niger, we had our first visit, meeting with communities of queer women and activists. At the secretariat level, we developed our first strategic plan towards the end of the year as a way of becoming more focused and deliberate in our work.

Building Self, Building Community, was the theme of our second Activist School, which took place in Lomé, Togo, in February 2014. Nineteen Francophone activists from Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, and Togo came together to deepen their skills in community organizing, documentation, and communications to substantively shape their political agenda in building a queer women’s movement in Francophone West Africa and Cameroon.

16 Voices, 16 Experiences: Queer African Women Talk about Violence, was our first virtual campaign, combining audio testimonies and illustrations to raise awareness around gender based violence against queer women. In collaboration with one of our members, Humanity First Cameroon, we published Social Pressures and the Construction of a Collective Identity: The Case of Women who have Sex with Women (WSW) in Yaoundé, which provided an overview of how WSW women perceive the current forms of LGBT activism in their country, address the tensions between their need to belong to a group and their concern for discretion and anonymity, and are dealing with the collective trauma resulting from the brutal murder of an activist Eric Lembembe.

To support the involvement of local groups in decisions that control their lives and expand our movement-building beyond LGBTQ organizing spaces, we held three convenings under the theme Emergence of Homosexual Identity in Africa, a Question of Citizenship and Social Justice in Benin, Burkina Faso, and Côte d’Ivoire, bringing together 60 activists from various social justice and LGBTQ organizations to build and strengthen collective efforts and begin to imagine the shape and content of a sub-regional advocacy network.

We then joined a special initiative led by a consortium of activists and funders to facilitate the establishment of an LGBTQ-led fund in West Africa, ISDAO.

We continued to deepen our commitment to fostering the emergence of a network of local leaders and to building collective power to work on our own behalf – by creating processes and events where we engage in political education, connecting lived realities with structural analysis to enhance our leadership and methods of actions. These activities took the form of various convenings and hands-on trainings. Our 3^rd Activist School gathered over 30 activists from 7 countries for a critical analysis of the nascent movement. A boot-camp brought together LGBTQ activists to strengthen their conceptual analysis and political vocabulary to be effective advocates at local and regional level. A sub-regional convening brought together social justice activists and LGBTQ activists to continue to shape a sub-regional advocacy network.

In collaboration with the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, we launched a pilot program, 11 Hour Project, supporting (with seed funding, technical support, and mentoring) new initiatives led by trans* and queer women in Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal.

With our constituency, which is grassroots, queer women, trans* and gender non-confirming-led groups and organizations at various stages of organizing, we continue to write our stories and shape our futures.

Grounded in feminist methodologies of organizing and research, QAYN is committed to:

• Supporting local queer women, trans* and gender non-confirming activists to develop their own leadership potential and sense of power
• Bottom-up, democratic, and egalitarian organizing
• The complex and messy world of practice
• Developing a system of support to provide mutual aid and solidarity
• Group-centered leadership.