About us
UHAI EASHRI
UHAI EASHRI is an indigenous activist fund, rooted in African Feminism and Indigeneity, committed to the freedom, justice, and dignity of LGBTIQ+ people and sex workers across Eastern Africa. Established in 2009, we mobilize resources to fuel movement-led agendas driven by communities in their full diversity.
Our participatory approach ensures that funding is grounded in lived realities and long-term vision. We invest in holistic wellbeing, security, cultural power, knowledge creation, and systemic change—while building sustainable infrastructure, advancing autonomy, and affirming the agency and resilience of African movements.
Our Vision: Live and embody revolutionary love
Our Mission
Over the past 15 years, UHAI has advanced autonomy, safety, and justice for LGBTIQ+ and sex worker movements in Eastern Africa by funding, strengthening, and convening bold, community-led organizing for liberation. Through flexible and participatory grantmaking, and a commitment to learning and listening, we remain steadfast in our dedication to becoming an increasingly trust-based grantmaker.
What values ground our work
UHAI EASHRI is driven by a commitment to love and outrage, authenticity and deep listening, and solidarity and collaboration as political acts. We champion agency, diversity, inclusion, equality, and justice, empowering communities as change agents. With a focus on quality, radical thought, creativity, and continuous learning, we strive to build transformative movements and uphold excellence in all we do.
Political Thought
UHAI’s politics are grounded in a decolonial, intersectional, and movement-centered ideology that recognises African LGBTIQ+ and sex worker communities as the architects of their own realities and liberation. As an activist fund, UHAI practices philanthropy as a political act—rooted in African Feminism and Indigeneity, and guided by the principles of self-determination, solidarity, and intersectionality. This means centering the lived realities of marginalised communities, resisting the colonial and patriarchal systems that criminalise and dehumanise them, and affirming their agency in shaping their futures.
In practice, UHAI positions itself as more than a funder: it is a partner, convener, and amplifier within movements, deliberately resourcing community-led strategies that challenge repression and nurture resilience. By raising resources as a form of reparations—to redress historical and ongoing injustice—UHAI invests in life-affirming futures of freedom, dignity, and justice for African sex workers and LGBTIQ+ people. This activist politics requires constant interrogation of power, resisting the logics of classical philanthropy and neoliberalism, and ensuring that movement voices—not donor agendas—define liberation pathways
The Executive
Reflecting the diverse movements, communities and countries that we serve, our team works collaboratively across borders and time zones to advance UHAI’s mission of justice, freedom, and dignity for LGBTIQ+ people and sex workers in Eastern Africa. In recognition of the socio-political risks that some of our team members face, we only feature those who have consented to be publicly named, honoring the choice of those who remain unnamed to safeguard their safety, privacy, and wellbeing in the often-hostile contexts in which we work.
