Breaking Point
The urgent need to invest in global LGBTIQ movements
In January 2025 the United States reversed fifteen years of foreign aid commitments to LGBTIQ communities. A year later, Outright International surveyed 229 LGBTIQ organizations in 94 countries and interviewed 24 of them in depth. 203 had lost funding. This is what that has meant — for shelters, clinics, legal aid, and the people who relied on them.
Published 10 September 2026 • Long read ~45 min • Also available as PDF
organizations surveyed
in 94 countries
reported losing funding
since January 2025
in-depth interviews,
June 2026
languages the survey
was fielded in
The findings in brief
What happened to LGBTIQ organizations after the 2025 funding cuts
Of 229 LGBTIQ organizations surveyed across 94 countries, 203 lost funding after January 2025. Nearly half of those lost more than half their total budget, and more than half traced the loss to a U.S. government source. The cuts fell hardest in countries where courts, police and public services already fail LGBTIQ people — the places where these organizations were the shelter, the lawyer and the emergency number. A year on, only 3% describe themselves as stable, and 36% say they are likely or very likely to be forced to close entirely within twelve months.
This page presents the report's findings in full — what was withdrawn, where it was withdrawn from, and what has happened since, in survey data from 203 affected organizations, in 24 in-depth interviews, and in the words of the people running services that no longer exist. The complete report, with its sources, footnotes and full testimony, is in the PDF.
Key findings
Five findings define the crisis
Most figures below describe the 203 organizations that reported losing funding — not LGBTIQ organizations worldwide. Finding 02 is the exception: it uses countries, not organizations, as its unit. Every number on this page carries its base.
FINDING 01
The funding cuts are deep, and they trace overwhelmingly to one government’s decision.
Among affected organizations, 49% lost more than half of their total budget, and 75% lost more than a quarter. More than half identified U.S. government funding as the source of what they lost. The losses concentrate among small, community-rooted groups: 73% operate on annual budgets under US$250,000, leaving no reserves to absorb a shortfall of this size.
FINDING 02
The cuts landed where the need was greatest.
While almost every country in the world has some form of queer organizing, those movements are funded differently. Where states actively protect the rights of sexual and gender minorities, LGBTIQ organizations can draw on funding from their own national or local governments; where the public broadly supports equality, they can raise money from private donors. Absent both, movements have depended heavily on the international funding that has now retracted, so the hardest-hit organizations are those working where the needs are most urgent. Organizations in countries with the harshest living conditions, the least impartial justice systems, the most widespread discrimination, and the deepest divisions between social groups were roughly two to three times more likely to have been affected by the cuts than those in countries at the other end of each measure. Organizations’ own accounts match that picture: two in five affected organizations operate amid democratic backsliding or authoritarian governance, and 71% report high levels of anti-LGBTIQ violence.
FINDING 03
Lifesaving services are contracting.
Half of the affected organizations have cut health services, including mental healthcare. On HIV specifically, 45% have reduced or discontinued prevention, treatment, or care, and 50% named LGBTIQ people living with HIV among the constituencies most affected by the reductions they made. Sixty-three percent can no longer respond to emergencies involving violence, arrests, displacement, or urgent relocation, a share that rises to 73% in countries experiencing conflict and humanitarian crises.
FINDING 04
The heaviest consequences fall on the most marginalized.
Trans, nonbinary, and gender diverse people (71%) and lesbian, bisexual, and queer women (61%) were named most frequently among those bearing the deepest impacts. For communities navigating overlapping forms of marginalization, LGBTIQ organizations were often the only system built to serve them at all.
FINDING 05
A substantial share of the movement may not survive the coming year.
Asked to describe their outlook for the next 12 months, 40% of affected organizations placed themselves at severe or immediate risk, including 10% facing an immediate risk of closure. Only 3% described their organization as stable. Asked separately how likely they were to be forced to close entirely within that period, 36% answered likely or very likely. These risks concentrate where the cuts were deepest and the financial cushion thinnest.
How we know
The evidence base
Three sources of evidence sit behind every claim in this report.
229
organizations
answered a global survey, fielded late February to late April 2026. In 94 countries. Distributed through Outright's networks and grantees, with outreach to peer organizations across regions. Available in ten languages.
24
in-depth interviews
conducted in June 2026. Drawn only from organizations that indicated through the survey a willingness to be contacted. Selection favored diversity across region, organization type and thematic focus.
120
countries with data
across all four vulnerability measures, in the country-level analysis. A country counts as affected if at least one LGBTIQ organization operating there had funding terminated. This shows where terminations were concentrated, not how many occurred.
Read the denominators carefully
Three different bases appear in this report, and they are not interchangeable. 229 is every survey respondent. 203 is the subset that lost funding — the analytic population for almost every percentage here. Countries, not organizations, are the unit in the country-level analysis. Because participation was voluntary, organizations affected by cuts had a stronger incentive to respond, so 203 of 229 does not mean nine in ten LGBTIQ organizations worldwide lost funding.
Quotations from survey responses are reproduced as submitted, with obvious typographical errors lightly corrected. Organizations are named only where they indicated they could be. In a small number of cases names have been withheld even where consent was given, because the security situation made publication inadvisable.
Chronology
How the funding disappeared
What was announced as a ninety-day pause became a permanent restructuring of who funds LGBTIQ human rights work, and whether anyone does.
20 January 2025
Executive Order 14169 imposes a 90-day freeze on nearly all U.S. foreign assistance. Operationalized as a stop-work order, it forces organizations across every region to halt programs, lay off staff, close shelters and turn away beneficiaries.
28 January 2025
A waiver exempts "life-saving humanitarian assistance" — defined narrowly as core medicine, medical services, food, shelter and subsistence. The same memo excludes diversity, equity and inclusion programs and what it terms "transgender surgeries" from the category of lifesaving work.
February 2025
Termination notices begin arriving. Not pauses — permanent cuts. Outright publishes Defunding Freedom, a rapid assessment covering 125 organizations in 59 UN member states.
By April 2025
The Global Equality Fund is shut down entirely. Launched in 2011 with allied governments, companies and foundations, it had distributed more than US$100 million in its first decade to LGBTIQ organizations and human rights defenders in over 100 countries.
1 July 2025
USAID ceases to exist as an independent agency after 64 years. Surviving programs are absorbed into the State Department.
Through 2025
PEPFAR is narrowed. HIV prevention support is restricted largely to pregnant and breastfeeding women; community-led service delivery for key populations goes unfunded. Corporate, institutional and philanthropic funders pull back in parallel.
2024–2025
More than 30% of global humanitarian funding disappears, driven largely by the collapse of U.S. support, which falls from roughly US$14 billion to US$3.7 billion. UNHCR loses US$1.2 billion in a single year and closes or downsizes 185 field offices.
Feb–Apr 2026
Outright fields the global survey behind this report. 229 organizations in 94 countries respond; 203 report losing funding.
September 2026
This report is published.
The emergency fund for LGBTIQ defenders was itself shut down
Dignity for All: LGBTQI+ Assistance Program · global · closed January 2025
Created in 2012 as the rapid-response arm of the Global Equality Fund, Dignity for All provided small, short-term grants for temporary relocation, legal representation, prison visits, trial monitoring, medical expenses, security measures and equipment replacement. It accepted applications from groups without formal registration, provided they could document at least six months of activism.
It was delivered by a consortium led by Freedom House with ILGA-Europe, Outright International, UHAI EASHRI, Akahatá and Synergia IHR. The stop-work order reached every grant under the Global Equality Fund, and the Fund closed entirely by April 2025. Freedom House's Emergency Assistance Program — which housed Dignity for All alongside the Lifeline fund — halted the same month, after supporting more than 17,000 defenders, organizations and survivors since 2007.
The consequence runs through the rest of this report. When organizations describe threats they could not answer in 2025 and 2026, the principal dedicated emergency mechanism for LGBTIQ defenders was itself suspended.
17,000+
defenders, organizations and survivors supported since 2007
80%+
of Freedom House programs terminated by the executive order
140
countries where those programs operated
Context
Lifesaving work, by any measure
The administration insisted the cuts would spare what mattered most. The organizations in this report show how much survival depends on the work its definition of “lifesaving” treated as expendable.
On January 28, 2025, a waiver exempted “lifesaving humanitarian assistance” from the freeze, defined narrowly as core medicine, medical services, food, shelter, and subsistence. The same memo excluded diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, along with what it termed “transgender surgeries,” from the category of lifesaving work. “We don’t want to see anybody die,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters in early February. By May, testifying before Congress, he asserted that no one had died as a result of the cuts and dismissed reports to the contrary as false.
The findings of this report challenge both the claim and the premise behind it. Organizations surveyed and interviewed for this report link the interruption of HIV treatment support directly to the deaths of community members, and describe the loss of shelter as leaving people to face, unprotected, the violence they had fled. Survival depends on work the waiver treated as expendable: safe houses that stand between a threatened person and their aggressors, emergency relocation away from active violence, mental healthcare in communities facing elevated suicide risk, livelihood programs that keep people out of destitution and unsafe survival strategies, and the community trust that makes all of these accessible.
Measured by the standard the administration itself invoked, whether people remain alive, queer organizing belongs squarely within the category of lifesaving work.
The dismantling went beyond a freeze. Within the State Department, the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL), which had housed the Global Equality Fund and managed the department’s main human rights grantmaking, was restructured around a new Office of Natural Rights, and the offices that ran its global programming were eliminated. The Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration was reorganized in parallel, shifting from refugee protection toward returns and creating an Office of Remigration.
A small share of aid that carried a great deal of work
The portion of foreign assistance that wealthy governments have allotted to LGBTIQ people’s health, human rights, and inclusion has always been minuscule. The field barely existed fifteen years ago. In 2010, all documented LGBTI grantmaking in the Global South and East came to US$36 million, awarded by 64 funders of every kind; government aid agencies provided 35.6% of those dollars, and the two largest funders that year were European bilateral agencies. Where criminalizing laws, social stigma, or hostility to civil society leave queer movements few options to fundraise domestically, that funding has allowed organizations to carry out crucial, sometimes lifesaving work.
US$36M
in 2010
All documented LGBTI grantmaking in the Global South and East, from 64 funders.
US$347M
by 2024
Total documented funding of LGBTIQ movements.
4¢
of every US$100
in official development assistance went to LGBTI communities in 2023–2024.
Eighteen months on, the consequences are no longer speculative
In February 2025, Outright published Defunding Freedom: Impacts of U.S. Foreign Aid Cuts on LGBTIQ People Worldwide, a rapid assessment of the immediate impacts on 125 LGBTIQ organizations in 59 UN member states. It captured a crisis in real time: organizations scrambling to understand which funding was frozen and which was terminated, staff let go without warning, shelters closing, HIV programs stalling. It was necessarily incomplete, written before most organizations knew the full scope of what they had lost.
What was framed as a temporary freeze has become a structural disruption. Corporate, institutional, and philanthropic donors have also shifted, stalled, or quietly withdrawn, often without public scrutiny. The environment has continued to deteriorate, with democratic backsliding, anti-NGO legislation, rising violence, coordinated legislative attacks on trans and intersex people’s rights, and emboldened anti-rights actors filling the space left by the retreat of U.S. global leadership. LGBTIQ organizations have not stood still. They have continued to resist, adapt, and serve their communities under extraordinary pressure, often absorbing the costs in ways that remain largely invisible. This report is an effort to make those costs, and that resilience, visible.
Part of a growing body of evidence
The Global Philanthropy Project’s (GPP) most recent Global Resources Report, covering 2023–2024, shows that global LGBTIQ funding had begun to fall even before the current U.S. administration took office: the first documented decrease on record, with steeper declines anticipated for 2025 and beyond. The Williams Institute assessed the foreseeable consequences of the executive order within weeks of its signing, and GPP’s survey of leading LGBTI intermediary funders documents how the elimination of U.S. government support destabilized the institutions that channel more than half of all grants to movements in the Global South and East. What these analyses capture through funding flows and donor data, this report documents from the other end of the pipeline: the organizations absorbing the cuts, and the communities losing what those organizations can no longer provide.
77%
of key population organizations surveyed by Global Black Gay Men Connect (Frozen Out) reported interruptions to antiretrovirals, PrEP, and condoms.
US$1.4–1.9B
projected annual fall in rights-focused development assistance by 2026 (Human Rights Funders Network).
50%+
of all grants to LGBTIQ movements in the Global South and East travel through intermediary funders (GPP).
The case for restoring this funding reaches well past LGBTIQ people themselves. National health systems reach the populations most exposed to infection through community organizations that people can approach without risking arrest. Humanitarian and development programs meet their commitments to serve those furthest behind through the same partners. Laws that limit queer organizing can silence civil society as a whole. Companies depend on markets where the rule of law holds. Every institution on this list has goals it cannot meet while leaving whole populations out, which means none of them can afford to lose the organizations that reach those populations.
Part 1 · Global Perspective
Aid withdrawn where it was needed most
The cuts hit hardest where living conditions are hardest, justice systems are least impartial, discrimination is most widespread, and divisions between social groups are deepest.
LGBTIQ people live in every part of the world, but the countries they live in face very different contexts. This analysis asks a global question: how did these funding cuts impact sexual and gender minorities across that range of contexts?
The four conditions measured below have something in common. Each describes a setting in which the institutions that ordinarily protect people (courts, police, public services) either fail people of queer experience or actively work against them. In those settings, LGBTIQ organizations take on functions no one else performs. Where living conditions are hardest, they become the shelter. Where violence and discrimination are widespread, they become the lawyer, the case file, the emergency number. Where divisions run deepest, they become the voice of a community whose members may otherwise not be able to speak: in the media, in the legislature, in the courts, and with allies.
Housing · 2.8×
57% of countries with the hardest living conditions were affected
Among the third of countries where material living conditions are hardest (the poorest in housing, basic services, and physical safety), 57% experienced the suspension of LGBTIQ-related funding: 2.8 times the rate in the strongest third, at 20%. The middle third recorded the highest rate of all, at 69%.
Family, schools, and the open market often turn LGBTIQ people away, and a landlord who learns how a tenant earns a living or whom they love can end a tenancy overnight. Organizations fill the gap with crisis shelters, housing advocacy, and community networks. Shelters and safe houses have now closed or come under threat in Kenya, Peru, Ukraine, Saint Lucia, and Uganda.
Criminal Justice · 2.2×
73% of countries with the least impartial justice systems were affected
Countries with the least impartial criminal justice systems were 2.2 times more likely to have been affected than the most impartial third: 73% against 33%.
Where justice is shaped by corruption, political pressure, or bias, attackers face little accountability and victims risk being treated as offenders. Organizations monitor abuses, document impunity, support survivors, secure lawyers, and draw attention to cases that would otherwise pass unremarked. In Nigeria, some fifty cases of homophobic attacks await a response organizations can no longer provide; in Iraq, rounds of arrests now pass undocumented.
Discrimination · ~2.5×
79% of the most discriminatory countries were affected
Countries with the highest levels of discrimination against marginalized groups across public services, employment, and legal norms were nearly two and a half times more likely to have experienced a suspension than the least discriminatory third: 79% against 32%.
Organizations supply what makes rights reachable at all: legal assistance, enforcement advocacy, documentation, and everyday navigation of hostile systems. One SWANA organization’s three lawyers have become one; a collective in Kyrgyzstan hires lawyers case by case; a rural legal clinic in Bangladesh has closed.
Group Divisions · 1.9×
59% of the most divided countries were affected
Countries with the highest levels of intergroup grievance (historical grievances, persecution, scapegoating, and unequal access to resources and political participation) were 1.9 times more likely to have experienced a suspension than countries with social cohesion or managed differences: 59% against 32%.
In societies fractured along group lines, LGBTIQ people are rarely counted among the groups whose grievances register at all. The organizations that served them were often the only actors treating them as a constituency worth protecting.
The challenges compound
Many countries face several of these challenges at once. Among the 120 countries with data across all four areas, the rate at which countries were affected rose with the number of measures on which a country fell into the worst-scoring group: more than twice the rate among countries facing none of these conditions.
32%
no measures
of countries in the worst-scoring group on no measure were affected.
63%
one measure
of countries in the worst-scoring group on exactly one measure were affected.
76%
two or more
of countries in the worst-scoring group on two or more measures were affected.
How to read these figures: a country counts as affected if at least one LGBTIQ organization operating there had funding terminated, based on Outright’s grantmaking records, survey responses, and information from partners. The figures show where terminations were concentrated, not how many occurred, and treat every country equally regardless of population. The universe is all countries in the world, not only those that received U.S. or other foreign assistance. The comparisons describe how suspensions were distributed; they do not by themselves establish causation.
Quote from Breaking Point
“Funding was pulled from the countries where LGBTIQ people have the fewest alternatives and where organizations carry the heaviest protective load.”
Part 2 · The View From the Ground
What affected organizations report
Ten ways the cuts are reshaping LGBTIQ organizations and the communities they serve, in survey data and in the words of the people running the work.
A total of 229 LGBTIQ organizations from 94 countries responded to the survey. Of these, 203 reported a loss of funding since January 2025, nearly nine in ten respondents. That does not mean nine in ten LGBTIQ organizations globally have experienced cuts: affected organizations likely had stronger incentives to respond. Unless otherwise stated, the figures below describe those 203 organizations.
Part 2 · 01
The scale and source of the cuts
For most affected organizations, the funding lost since January 2025 was not marginal. 49% lost more than half of their total budget, and 75% lost more than a quarter. For nearly half, the cuts removed most of the resources that sustained the organization.
The cuts are strikingly concentrated in their origin. More than half pointed to a source tied to the U.S. government, including USAID, PEPFAR, and the Department of State. No other funder came close: Outright International was named by 17% of affected organizations, a figure that largely reflects U.S. government funding Outright re-granted to partners rather than Outright’s own institutional funds (and in some cases Outright grants that ended on schedule). A smaller number named European, United Nations, and private donors.
The organizations bearing these losses are mostly small and community-rooted: 73% operate on annual budgets under US$250,000, and fewer than one in twenty reported budgets above US$1 million. Most are advocacy or legal reform organizations, direct service providers, or both at once.
49%
lost more than half of their total budget
26%
lost between a quarter and half
73%
operate on annual budgets under US$250,000
In Peru, the Association of Transvestites, Transsexuals, and Transgender People of Peru (ATTTPE) traced cuts across more than one major funder:
We were working with support from the Global Fund, but funding cuts forced us to move to a smaller space and reduce our staff. We had a project in partnership with the World Council of Credit Unions, which receives funding from USAID; after the funding cuts, we had to set the project aside because it was canceled.
ATTTPE, Peru
In Chile, the Homosexual Movement of Integration and Liberation (Movilh) described how the loss of foreign government funding undermined a service that had long anchored the country’s response to discrimination:
Historically, Movilh has handled more than 90% of the reported cases of discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression in Chile, providing free legal, psychological, and peer support to those affected. This work has been seriously hindered. Since August 2025, this service has depended on the volunteer work of our activists due to cuts in state funding.
Movilh, Chile
An LGBTIQ organization in Tunisia, unnamed for its safety, lost most of its funding through three mechanisms at once: the broad contraction in donor funding after the U.S. freeze; funders who conditioned support on the removal of its public statements of solidarity with Palestine, and withdrew when it refused; and a government crackdown on foreign funding that saw transfers blocked or treated as potentially criminal, its director summoned and interrogated by police, and its landlord decline to keep hosting the office. Six employees were let go, work moved online until community members asked whether the organization still existed, and emergency cash support for rent and food stopped almost entirely. People it used to house or feed, it reported, are now on the streets.
Together, these figures establish the shape of the crisis: deep cuts, concentrated in a small number of major donors, falling disproportionately on small organizations with limited reserves.
Háttér Society, the oldest and largest LGBTIQ organization in Hungary, combines mental health support, sexual health services, legal aid, and strategic litigation with advocacy, training, and public education. Before the cuts it was also a resource hub, regranting funds to smaller queer organizations across the country.
Its first loss came before the executive orders: a U.S. State Department grant of roughly US$300,000 that sustained the regranting program expired in September 2024, and after the U.S. election the organization was told a renewal would not come. The stop-work order then froze the grant’s closing phase, including final payments for regranting already carried out; halted a project training activists outside Budapest to respond to anti-gender discourse while caring for their mental health; and disrupted funding through ILGA-Europe that itself originated with the State Department. One grant could continue only with funds already transferred; another, meant to lay the groundwork for a community center in Budapest, was never signed.
Háttér can still mentor smaller groups and apply jointly with them, but no longer has a budget to transfer funds directly. Months later, once it was clear which funds could be paid, it had to reopen financial and reporting processes with grantees who considered their grants closed. Even though most of the original funding was eventually recovered, a stop-work order keeps generating costs long after activities stop.
The losses hit at an exceptionally demanding moment. In March 2025, Hungary banned Pride marches under the banner of child protection. In June, Budapest Pride went ahead regardless and became the largest march in Hungary’s history. In April 2026, elections ended sixteen years of Viktor Orbán’s rule, opening a window for legal reform and for rebuilding independent institutions. Háttér now faces both the aftermath of repression and the opportunities of a democratic transition with fewer resources, and without the regranting capacity that any such rebuilding will require.
Part 2 · 02
Funding cuts in hostile contexts
For many organizations, the loss of funding arrived alongside democratic backsliding, anti-NGO laws, restrictions on foreign funding, criminalization, queerphobic rhetoric, and rising violence. More than two in five affected organizations operate where civic space, democratic institutions, or fundamental freedoms are under pressure. For most, the cuts are landing on several of these pressures at once.
In restrictive environments, funding cuts do more than reduce programming. They can limit an organization’s ability to comply with burdensome administrative requirements, respond to hostile laws, maintain legal status, protect activists, document violations, or challenge queerphobic narratives, and force it to scale back the very activities that help communities survive repression: safety and security training, strategic litigation, legal support, public advocacy, community mobilization, and emergency response.
The contexts in which the cuts are landing
Conditions reported by the 203 affected organizations
71%
high levels of anti-LGBTIQ violence
71%
high levels of poverty or economic inequality
56%
no ability for trans people to change gender markers on official documents (66% among organizations working directly with trans communities)
43%
same-sex relations or gender nonconformity criminalized
41%
democratic backsliding or authoritarian governance
40%
restrictive laws on civil society or foreign funding
In Iraq, IraQueer described the interruption of a project to strengthen the safety of queer organizations and activists after a 2024 law criminalized same-sex conduct and trans people’s gender expression and set prison terms for the undefined offense of “promoting homosexuality”:
After the law was passed, we had a project to cover all queer orgs and activists, so they could receive an extensive series of safety and security training/workshops, but the project stopped due to funding cuts.
IraQueer, Iraq
Middle East Voice, a diaspora-based organization serving Iraqi queer communities through reporting, digital campaigns, documentation of violations and arrests, and connections to affirming healthcare, operates where speaking publicly carries a risk of arrest and even an Arabic term for “gender” is treated as suspect. Documentation is itself a form of protection: many rounds of arrests are never documented. The cuts ended its ability to pay the journalists who investigated violations, halted its online platform, and stopped a campaign building a directory of doctors willing to treat trans and gender nonconforming people safely, at a moment when some medical professionals were urging colleagues to report them to the authorities.
What worries me the most is that the laws are getting worse. Organizations are silenced in Iraq since 2025; they are rightfully scared to speak.
Founder, Middle East Voice
In Argentina, where the national government closed the ministry responsible for gender and diversity and the national antidiscrimination institute, and tried to restrict gender-affirming care for minors by decree, a feminist LGBTIQ organization cut back its own services as the state withdrew:
At a time when Argentina has ceased to implement public policies for LGBTI+ people and to reform laws, we deeply regret having had to cut back on direct support services for LGBTI+ people and having to limit our priorities to the most urgent needs.
A feminist LGBTIQ organization, Argentina
In Mexico, an organization connected the cuts to tax and regulatory burdens threatening organizations’ legal and financial viability:
In addition to budget cuts, there has been a shrinking of civic space; tax laws are making it increasingly difficult to maintain our status as authorized grantees, with high taxes and increasingly specific regulations, and a large number of civil society organizations in Mexico have already been stripped of their status. We need the capacity to strengthen our administrative processes and ensure everything is in order to avoid fines or the loss of our status.
An LGBTIQ organization, Mexico
The result is a growing gap between community needs and organizational capacity: more threats, more legal and political attacks, more violence, and fewer resources to respond.
Quote from Breaking Point
“Defunding operates as a force multiplier: it does not create hostility from scratch, but it weakens the very organizations that are best positioned to respond to it.”
Dignity for All: LGBTQI+ Assistance Program was created in 2012 as the rapid response mechanism of the Global Equality Fund, an LGBTIQ funding platform managed by the U.S. State Department with partner governments, businesses, and foundations. Delivered by a consortium led by Freedom House with ILGA-Europe, Outright International, UHAI EASHRI, Akahatá, and Synergia IHR, it provided small, short-term grants for temporary relocation, legal representation, prison visits, trial monitoring, medical expenses, dependent support, security measures, and equipment replacement, and accepted applications from unregistered groups that could document six months of activism. It also funded rapid advocacy campaigns against anti-LGBTIQ legislation and violence, and helped organizations build protection plans and digital, physical, and organizational security. Outright served as one of the entry points through which emergency requests reached the program.
The program was shut down in January 2025, and the Global Equality Fund entirely by April. Freedom House’s Emergency Assistance Program, which housed Dignity for All with the Lifeline: Embattled CSOs Assistance Fund, halted the same month after supporting more than 17,000 defenders, organizations, and survivors since 2007. Freedom House reported that the executive order terminated more than 80% of its programs across more than 140 countries, leaving assistance for hundreds of individuals stranded mid-process. Organizations throughout this report describe threats they could not answer while the principal dedicated emergency mechanism for LGBTIQ defenders was itself suspended.
A feminist queer collective in Kyrgyzstan, unnamed for its safety, faced these pressures one after another. Under the 2023 law prohibiting “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations,” modeled on Russian legislation, ordinary public education and community work can expose an organization to accusations of “promoting” such relations, while the 2024 law on “foreign representatives” lets authorities treat internationally funded NGOs as politically suspect. Media attacks, persecution of activists, and obligations to disclose personal information forced the collective to restructure to protect its staff.
Months later, a letter announced that funding channeled through a European intermediary, originating in U.S. government money, was suspended with immediate effect, removing around half its financial base. The collective also feared that names of staff who had worked on U.S.-funded projects could be exposed. For several months, six staff members continued the core work without salaries. The organization survived because its staff personally absorbed the shock.
Allied shelters grew reluctant to take in sexual and gender minorities, fearing government pressure; today only one shelter remains accessible, overcrowded and occasionally able to take a single person for a short period. Lawyers willing to take LGBTIQ cases declined sharply, and the collective pays freelancers case by case. In some urgent situations, staff, partners, and community members, including trans sex workers, have pooled their own money to pay for legal services.
The hardest lesson concerns visibility. International emergency funding was difficult to access because the crisis was rarely recognized as “active”: no single dramatic incident, but a slow, cumulative emergency in a region that receives little attention.
Funders sometimes think that if a crisis is not actively murdering people, then it is not a crisis. But it is still a crisis for us. It is the situation we live in, and people continue trying to stay alive. The crisis in Central Asia is sometimes invisible because we do not have media coverage, or because we are a small region, but the work is still important.
A feminist queer collective, Kyrgyzstan
Part 2 · 03
Organizational survival under threat
For many organizations, the crisis has moved from individual projects to the basic ability to function. Funding cuts are reducing teams, forcing specialized workers out, increasing dependence on unpaid labor, and pushing remaining staff and volunteers into unsustainable workloads. The losses reach institutional memory, technical expertise, community trust, and the human infrastructure that allows organizations to respond to crises over time.
71%
of affected organizations reported staff layoffs or reduced staff pay
72%
of those expect significant staff attrition in the next 12 months
In West Africa, an intersex-led organization could no longer maintain office space or paid staff: “All staff members are therefore working as volunteers under the current financial situation.” In Kenya, Mamboleo Peer Empowerment Group (MPEG) described what staff losses meant for the community:
Funding cuts hit us hard at the community level. We had to let go of 100 peer educators, caregivers, outreach workers, and paralegals, the people who were not just staff but trusted faces within the LGBTQ community. These were the individuals who checked in on clients, supported them to stay on HIV treatment, responded to GBV [gender-based violence] cases, and ensured no one felt alone. With their absence, outreach activities stopped almost overnight. Safe spaces went quiet, food support was disrupted, and emergency shelter and evacuation assistance became difficult to sustain…What we lost was not just services but connection, trust, and a vital lifeline for our community.
MPEG, Kenya
Peer educators, paralegals, outreach workers, psychosocial staff, and case managers are often the bridge between marginalized communities and the few services accessible to them. When they are laid off, the relationships they held go with them. MOSAIC, working in Lebanon and the broader SWANA region, compared a 2023 UN Women–funded project with what smaller 2025 grants allow:
We reduced all our staff members to part-time, including social worker, MEAL [Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning], finance, and case manager. Our service providers are providing less than half the number of services they used to provide: 20 beneficiaries for mental health versus 80 previously, and 40 legal sessions versus 120. We had to relocate the office to a smaller one, lower rent, but also smaller for community gatherings and mobilisation.
MOSAIC, Lebanon
We used to have two organizational operation locations: one for the administrative and advocacy works, the other one was for service delivery acting as a psycho-social and legal counseling clinic. The number of staff of the organization including part-times were 12 people. Since January 2025, we had to close our climate crisis and emergency response program, let go of 5 of our staff members including from within advocacy and psychological counselors. We had to shut down one of our office spaces, rearrange the working hours and [salaries] of our remaining staff.
May 17 Association, Türkiye
The burden leads to burnout. The founder of Winam Chanua Dada CBO (CHADALA) in Kenya reported “suffering from serious burnout due to the heavy workload, as I have to handle everything on my own.” In Mexico, Fundación Arcoiris por el Respeto a la Diversidad Sexual described the search for replacement funding as a drain in itself: “More than half of their time is spent seeking funding sources and drafting grant proposals.”
Specialized functions disappear the moment the grant that paid for them ends. The African Queer Youth Initiative (AQYI), a pan-African network of LGBTIQ youth activists, lost its monitoring, evaluation, and learning officer when a Dutch-funded Love Alliance grant closed. The role had “ensured consistent outcome tracking, stronger documentation, safer data practices, internal learning, and credible donor reporting.” “When the funding ended, that capacity was lost almost immediately.” AQYI has had to scale back structured outcome tracking and learning reviews, precisely the evidence on which accountability and the next round of fundraising depend.
An LGBTIQ organization in North Africa, unnamed for security reasons, has operated for over a decade in one of the region’s most restrictive environments. It lost roughly 70 to 80% of its budget when three donors withdrew after the executive order, ending four projects spanning therapeutic support, well-being programming, legal aid, and community services. A team of around 12 fell to five and then, effectively, to one person. Services that had extended beyond the capital retreated to a single city.
Its director described what triage does to a service built on trust: “I’m completely burnt out. We’re having to prioritize the worst cases, which creates bias and lack of clarity.” Refugees and migrants from neighboring countries in crisis are among those most affected. The director called this the worst period the organization has experienced: “What worries me the most is the situation staying like this. We’re going backwards.”
Diversidad Dominicana had expanded its presence to all 32 provinces and sustained an unusually broad portfolio: a School of Political Leadership preparing LGBTIQ candidates for elected office, legal aid and strategic litigation reaching the Inter-American system, community education in working-class neighborhoods, and emergency assistance for people facing violence, homelessness, or mental health crises. The cuts hit nearly every function at once.
Its remaining resources now go to keeping the office open, paying utilities, retaining a minimal administrative structure, and preserving its legal existence so it can rebuild. Rapid response (accompanying people to trusted medical providers, helping women leave unsafe homes and reach shelters or prosecutors safely) can no longer be performed consistently. Provincial outreach has largely stopped, and the fifth cohort of the leadership school is on hold.
In September 2025, the organization’s director was forced into exile under the protection of Amnesty International after sustained death threats tied to her human rights work. Diversidad Dominicana now names closure as a real risk: the cuts “have directly impacted our lives in deeply harmful ways. We no longer have the resources to confront violence or provide the support our community needs.”
Organizations are being forced to choose among keeping their doors open, paying staff, maintaining core services, and searching for new funding: a survival cycle in which they spend more time trying to remain operational and less time doing the work their communities urgently need. The impact is cumulative: fewer paid staff, more unpaid labor, reduced expertise, higher burnout, and weaker capacity to sustain the community relationships on which LGBTIQ movements depend.
Part 2 · 04
The erosion of community infrastructure
Funding cuts are eroding the physical and relational infrastructure queer communities rely on. In many contexts, LGBTIQ offices are among the few spaces where people can safely gather, receive information, access referrals, seek emergency support, or build collective power. A drop-in center is often where violence at home is first disclosed, where an eviction is caught before it becomes homelessness, and where someone finds the referral that keeps a crisis from escalating. When these spaces close, the loss is social, emotional, political, and protective.
68%
reported reduced community spaces or support networks, the most commonly reported consequence in the entire survey
33%
reported reduced or discontinued access to office space, including regional office closures or shifts to remote work
Since 2016, we have succeeded in creating a safe space for women and LGBTIQ+ individuals. In this space, groups would meet and various services were provided, but above all, new leaders were developed and the LGBTIQ+ organizational network in [our city] was strengthened. On February 1 of this year, shortly before celebrating 10 years of existence and comprehensive care, we were forced to close [our community house]. It has been a true loss for the LGBTIQ+ communities in our city and the country as a whole, as we were a model of self-management and resistance in one of Ecuador’s most conservative cities.
An LGBTIQ organization, Ecuador
The loss of space is also a loss of reach. An organization on Sulawesi island in Indonesia reported that funding constraints limit its ability to reach “almost all parts of [the province], especially the most remote districts.”
When regional and grantmaking organizations lose funding, the grassroots groups they support lose the flexible resources that keep their spaces open. ERA, the LGBTI Equal Rights Association for the Western Balkans and Türkiye, lost U.S. funding that underwrote its support to member organizations:
One concrete example is the loss of our ability to provide small grants and sustained peer-to-peer capacity support to member organisations across the Western Balkans and Turkey. For a regional network like ERA, this is not peripheral work. It is how local groups keep safe spaces open, maintain community services, exchange expertise and remain visible in increasingly hostile environments. When funding is cut, the first thing that disappears is flexible support for grassroots organisations, especially smaller groups working with trans people, sex workers, people living with HIV, migrants and others facing layered marginalisation. The result is not simply fewer activities. It is weaker community infrastructure, less protection, and fewer people reached where support is most urgently needed.
ERA
KL Queer Space in Kuala Lumpur serves queer youth and trans and gender-diverse people, including many who feel unwelcome even in mainstream queer spaces. Since January 2025 it has paused approved hires, delayed strategy and systems work, reduced stipends for facilitators and volunteers, and cut back events and open hours. Its role as a first point of contact for people in difficulty now depends on volunteer goodwill, and it has stepped back from coalition and advocacy spaces amid intensifying conservative rhetoric and moral policing.
One beneficiary had described the space as the only place they felt safe being themselves; when it closed for a period, they had nowhere else to go. The harm has arrived quietly: fewer open hours, fewer events, slower responses, and the gradual removal of a lifeline for people already at the margins.
Founded in 2018 in rural northern Bangladesh to empower young people of diverse genders and sexualities, Indigenous communities, and marginalized women, Noboprobhaat once met informally in marketplaces and open grounds. Support through the USAID Equality Project let it rent an office that became a workspace, a coordination base, and a rare safe space in a region with no other queer infrastructure.
Notified without warning that the project would not continue, it let its staff go and gave up the premises almost immediately. Peer counseling on family rejection, pressure to marry, and threats from extremist groups lost its setting. Monthly legal sessions with the organization’s lawyer ended, removing a rare access-to-justice pathway. Handicraft-based livelihood training for trans people and others separated from their families was interrupted; some participants returned to sex work, and contact with others has been lost.
Its online safety training for people using social media and dating apps for the first time, amid threats of doxxing by extremist groups, survives only in reduced form on volunteers and small flexible funds. Seven years of slow institutional construction were reversed in days, while anti-LGBTIQ violence in Bangladesh continues to rise.
Community infrastructure is built slowly, through years of trust, presence, and relationship-building. Once lost, it cannot be quickly replaced. A shuttered office or a suspended small-grants program leaves entire communities with fewer places to gather, fewer trusted people to contact, and fewer pathways to safety.
Quote from Noboprobhaat Foundation
“Everything was stopped overnight.”
Part 2 · 05
Emergency response, shelter, and protection gaps
63% of affected organizations are unable to respond to emergencies or protection needs, including violence, threats, arrests, displacement, homelessness, loss of shelter, and urgent relocation.
Nowhere is this more immediate than in the loss of shelter. Shelters and safe houses are where a person sleeps on the night they flee violence, eviction, or family rejection. When they close, the alternatives are the street, the unsafe home, or the grasp of an aggressor. Survey responses and interviews document shelters closing or at risk on four continents, including in settings marked by armed conflict.
In Kenya, Nadharia CBO, working with LBQ women, queer refugees and displaced people, youth, and people with disabilities, closed its shelter when rent became unaffordable: “We have been given a grace period for our office, but if we do not pay, we will lose it as well.” Termination letters went out in December 2025; staff have worked as volunteers since. In Peru, Féminas described the risk to Hogar Féminas, Lima’s first transitional shelter for trans people:
For a decade, we have held weekly meetings and provided comprehensive support; however, funding cuts have directly impacted our ability to sustain this work. Currently, the lack of resources limits access to the shelter and makes it difficult to cover basic needs such as electricity, water, and facility maintenance. This situation not only reduces the scope of our work but also puts the shelter at real risk of closure, which would leave many trans people without a safe space and essential support.
Féminas, Peru
In Saint Lucia, Raise Your Voice Saint Lucia ran two safe houses, one for women and children and one for LGBTIQ people, as part of a six-to-eight-month pathway combining counseling, legal aid, rental assistance, food, medical care, and economic empowerment. The cuts forced it to give up both leases. Shelter now depends on costlier stopgaps (a shared apartment, a guesthouse room paid by the night) and referrals to welfare systems that can take up to 90 days to respond. It now weighs whether each person’s circumstances are “severe enough” for help at all, and describes what has been lost as a matter of life and death.
These are not isolated cases. In Kenya, an LBQ women’s shelter can no longer feed its residents and has been displaced to a rural area, and shelters serving LGBTIQ refugees have scaled down. An LGBTIQ-led refugee organization in Uganda has lost its emergency relocation support. Organizations in Indonesia and Tunisia have stopped or reduced housing support.
Where crises overlap
Among the 60 respondents operating in humanitarian crisis or armed conflict
73%
unable to respond to emergencies or protection needs
65%
closed programs or offices
58%
reduced, suspended, or discontinued shelter or emergency response work
In these settings, LGBTIQ organizations are often first responders: emergency shelter, safe relocation, psychosocial support, legal referrals, food assistance, rapid protection funds, documentation. When these capacities disappear, community members are not simply referred elsewhere. In many cases, there is nowhere else safe, affirming, or accessible to go.
Without funding, we have lost the ability to safely reach vulnerable individuals, document their experiences, or provide even minimal support in moments of crisis. In a country where LGBTQ+ voices are already silenced by fear and stigma, this means deeper isolation and invisibility.
Middle East Voice, Iraq
We had an emergency response fund to support activists and grassroots organizations in crisis, but we had to close it. Since then, we have gotten about 100+ applications that are unsupported.
A regional organization, West Africa
Previously, we were able to maintain safe spaces, offer emergency housing, and respond directly to cases of violence—services that are rarely available elsewhere in the country. With the loss of funding, these essential interventions have been scaled down or completely halted.
Ivy Foundation, Malawi
The protection gap is especially acute for LGBTIQ refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and displaced people. In Kenya, Resilient Hearts Africa has been forced to scale down safe accommodation, food, and mental health support for refugee women and LGBTIQ individuals, leaving some “without consistent access to safe housing and essential supplies.” In Mexico, UNHCR lost roughly 60% of its budget and closed four offices, and some aid groups ceased operations entirely. Casa Frida, an LGBTIQ shelter for refugees and displaced people, described the result:
Most humanitarian organizations working on migration and displacement in Mexico have closed operations, increasing the burden of services and protection on ours, which pushes us to bear a great responsibility to resist.
Casa Frida, Mexico
In Ukraine, a queer-led organization working with displaced people, people living with HIV, and sex workers stopped paying some specialists and cut its hours: “now we are forced to limit ourselves to one-time consultations or refuse assistance altogether.” LGBT Association LIGA cannot guarantee its medical team of two family doctors, a psychiatrist, and two psychological counselors: “For many people, this will mean losing their only safe access to help.”
Funding cuts have directly disrupted our ability to provide emergency protection and relocation support for LGBTQ+ individuals facing immediate threats. We previously maintained a small but reliable emergency fund that allowed us to quickly relocate individuals at risk of arrest or violence to safe locations. Due to recent funding gaps, we were unable to respond adequately to a recent case involving five staff members and community activists who required urgent relocation. While we secured temporary shelter through partner support, we could not cover long-term relocation, security, or basic needs. This has left individuals in prolonged uncertainty and increased risk. The cuts have not only limited our responsiveness but also weakened trust within the community, as we are no longer able to guarantee timely and comprehensive support in crisis situations.
An organization in a small city in Tanzania’s interior
An organization supporting sex workers, LGBTIQ people, and gender nonconforming people, unnamed for security reasons, serves people living and working in slums, behind markets, and in areas reachable only by motorbike. Its rapid response rested on trusted contact, available hands, and resources to act quickly. Field visits that ran about three days a week to distribute condoms, test kits, and other supplies have fallen to one, sustained by roughly three volunteers, while reports of violence, harassment, and evictions grow. Ghana’s anti-LGBTQ bill, passed by Parliament in May 2026 and still under revision at the time of writing, has deepened fear, stigma, and trauma.
These are people who have always put their trust in us. When they face emergencies, including violence, they call us. But now our rapid response system is no longer functioning as before. Now people ask, “If we need you in an emergency, will you be there?” Those questions alone break trust.
An organization in Ghana
When UN agencies retreat, their local partners absorb the shock. Kaos GL, Türkiye’s longest-standing queer organization, reported that UNHCR’s withdrawal from a joint project forced the closure of its Refugee Rights Program office, layoffs, and an 85% reduction in program activities:
The UNHCR in Türkiye unilaterally withdrew from our collaborative project for LGBTI+ refugees in 2025 which caused our association to shut down the Refugee Rights Program office, lay off staff members and reduced the program activities by 85%. This caused LGBTI+ refugees [to be] left alone without psycho-social and legal support, and community support.
Kaos GL, Türkiye
Alliance Global, founded in 2002, works in seven regions and runs three shelters, safe spaces, a paralegal hub, humanitarian aid, HIV and STI services, and a mental health program that has involved thirteen psychologists and two psychiatrists. Few mainstream humanitarian providers offer services for sexual and gender minorities, and gay and bisexual men who fear military mobilization may be unable to leave home to reach help. When Alliance Global cannot reach them, in many cases no one does.
The Global Fund is reducing support by 15% this year and another 15% in 2027; protection projects have lost 30 to 40% of their budgets; some funding streams have ended. Alliance Global has laid off staff, lost its procurement officer, and shut down its hotline. Its director noted that donors fund visible project staff more readily than the operational roles that keep an organization running, and rarely fund mental health support for workers: “It’s very difficult to help other people when you have to help yourself.” His greatest worry: “What worries us the most is being able to sustain current levels of services, especially shelter and safe houses.”
Funding cuts reduce not only the number of people organizations can help, but the speed, consistency, and trustworthiness of that help. They turn organizations able to intervene into organizations that can only listen, refer, or turn people away, at precisely the moments when timely support determines whether people remain safe, housed, connected, and alive.
Part 2 · 06
Health services under threat
Funding cuts are weakening the community-led health systems many people of queer experience rely on, especially where public and private facilities are inaccessible, unsafe, or discriminatory. The cuts strike HIV testing, treatment adherence support, PrEP information, STI prevention, mental health counseling, psychosocial support, harm reduction, reproductive health, referrals, and safe community-based care. These services work because they are community-led, delivered by trusted organizations that understand the risks LGBTIQ people face.
51%
reduced, suspended, or discontinued health services, including mental health
45%
reduced or discontinued HIV prevention, treatment, or care
50%
named LGBTIQ people living with HIV among the constituencies most affected
58%
reported that LGBTIQ people they work with lost access to health services
HIV services
Fifty-seven percent of affected organizations reported cuts to HIV-related services, named LGBTIQ people living with HIV among the most affected groups, or both.
The organisation was mobilising MSM [men who have sex with men] and Transwomen for HIV testing and counseling. With the funding cuts we are unable to refill medication for our constituents which has led to defaulting and in severe cases death of 2 of the people who defaulted.
An organization, Zimbabwe
Before the funding cut we usually conducted HIV testing, health education, condom distribution, prep administration and treated other STIs infection in rural areas where LGBTIQ community members have low access to healthcare. Due to funding cuts we no longer provide these services due to inadequate funds to cover the gaps created. Medical supplies, transportation and staffing are seriously limited.
Community Health Initiative for Youths in Nigeria
A clear example is the suspension of our community-led outreach program for key populations in hard-to-reach districts such as Mangochi and Mzuzu…We are no longer able to sustain transport, outreach allowances and commodity distribution, resulting in zero clinics and no follow-up support. As a result, many community members have lost consistent access to life-saving services, increasing their vulnerability to HIV infection, untreated GBV [gender-based violence] cases and disengagement from care.
An organization, Malawi
LGBTQ community members living with HIV/ AIDS find it difficult to be taking their medication because they complain of not having money to get 3 square meals a day.
An organization, Ghana
[We have] a limited amount of harm reduction tools and kits. The available stock doesn’t meet the high demand which increases the risk of contracting HIV and other STIs.
A queer-led organization, Jordan
One concrete example is the shutdown of our safe space drop-in centers for the LGBTI community in Manzini and Mbabane. For years, these centers provided confidential HIV testing, mental health support, legal referrals and a safe environment for people facing stigma and violence. When funding was cut, we were forced to close the centers. Within months we noticed a decline in LGBTI clients accessing HIV prevention services at public facilities and community paralegals noted an increase in unreported cases of harassment because survivors no longer had a trusted place to seek help.
HealthPlus 4 Men, Eswatini
USAID PEPFAR funding cuts abruptly halted our implementation of Kenya’s National HIV/STI Guidelines for Transgender People, disrupting critical community-led health interventions…We were compelled to lay off trained peer educators and paralegals at the same time that affirming health workers in link facilities were being let go, significantly weakening community access to care and justice pathways.
Jinsiangu Kenya
Blue Diamond Society, Nepal’s pioneering LGBTIQ organization founded in 2001, grew out of HIV outreach and brought the litigation that led Nepal’s Supreme Court to order legal recognition of gender minorities in 2007. In 2024 it received USAID funding for an HIV program spanning 21 districts and 24 service sites, including clinic-based PrEP.
In February 2025, as the stop-work order took effect, it was told: “Don’t go to the office. Lock your office. Don’t leave your house.” This came in the same weeks it hosted the tenth ILGA Asia Conference in Kathmandu, with roughly 600 participants from more than 150 countries. The clinics closed, and with them condoms, lubricant, and PrEP. An estimated 400 to 500 people connected to the program were affected.
Queer people seeking treatment now “go to ART sites of government where they face stigma and discrimination,” and the organization has lost the ability to track what is happening: “Service is interrupted. We don’t know prevalence data.” The clinics had also employed community members with few other job options. In July 2026, the Associated Press reported that roughly 100 former aid workers in Nepal, including outreach workers from Blue Diamond Society’s network, had turned to sex work after losing that income. Awareness programs on sexual and reproductive health and on gender-based violence were interrupted too.
For Executive Director Manisha Dhakal, the U.S. order recognizing only two sexes shifted the discourse: “We had to lose our identity as transgender women,” and “people were scared to participate in the program.” Communities were pushed into government services before those services were made safe for them. Her message to U.S. philanthropies and corporate funders: “Please don’t do the same as your government is doing.”
In a Southern African country, a consortium of public health, human rights, and key-population-led organizations (unnamed for security reasons) had built one of the region’s most developed community-based HIV platforms with USAID and PEPFAR support: one-stop wellness centers offering HIV testing, oral and long-acting injectable PrEP, treatment support, mental health services, and economic empowerment. It served more than 6,000 transgender people and more than 5,000 men who have sex with men, large numbers of female sex workers, and some 40,000 adolescent girls and young women through PEPFAR’s DREAMS programming, and was among the first implementers globally to provide long-acting injectable PrEP outside a study setting.
The January 2025 stop-work orders dismantled it almost overnight. Centers closed, vehicles were grounded, and staff lost email access with no guidance on contacting clients due for refills or injections. More than 1,500 workers were made redundant within days or weeks. There was no handover and no client-transition plan. Public facilities, many untrained to serve key populations amid stigma and criminalization, were expected to absorb thousands of clients, and with tracking systems down there was no way to know who had stopped treatment or PrEP, or might be developing drug resistance.
It takes one minute to destroy all that which you have built over years. PEPFAR had built its foundation deep-rooted in many countries, and its dismantling to the zero ground may take another 20 to 25 years to rebuild in terms of putting together strong human resources, strong people, management, and expertise.
A public health specialist, Southern Africa
Tonga, a country of roughly one hundred thousand people, reported only five people living with HIV at the end of 2025, a record sustained in part by community-based testing, education, and prevention from organizations such as the Tonga Leitis Association (TLA), which works with leitis (Tongans assigned male at birth who live with a feminine gender expression), other LGBTIQ people, sex workers, and older persons. The cuts erode that prevention infrastructure just as neighboring Fiji has declared a national HIV outbreak, with newly reported cases tripling in a single year. A rise in infections would also hand new material to those who already stigmatize leitis, by holding them responsible for it.
Mental health and sexual and reproductive health
With less to no funding our community does not access a community space we used to have and this has affected the quality of life. Queer people in the rural areas need a space to meet and talk about life issues especially in the current political climate. These safe spaces offer psycho-social support to our community which they need to thrive.
A community-based organization, Kenya
The sexual and reproductive health of LBQ women, trans men, and other people assigned female at birth is a particular blind spot. Mainstream systems assume heterosexual, cisgender patients, while HIV funding has historically centered on gay, bisexual, and queer men and trans women. Within LGBTIQ funding, itself less than 1% of all foundation and government funding, only an estimated 5% goes specifically to lesbian, bisexual, and queer issues.
In Kenya, CHADALA, led by and serving young LBQ women including teenage mothers and survivors of violence, opened its Salama Wadada shelter in 2021 with funding from a USAID-funded partner. In 2025 it lost 100% of the funding it expected. It closed the shelter, relocated to another county where access is harder and discrimination sharper, could no longer feed residents or sustain mental health programming, and let its whole team go. Two people now run it from home without salaries, receiving cases of violence they can no longer shelter: “It’s overwhelming, discouraging.”
A concrete example is the cancellation of the regional project “Mi Salud Transmasculina,” which funded working groups in Peru and regional partnerships with Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador to produce information, provide support, and develop materials on trans men’s health…Due to the cuts, these teams abruptly ceased operations, and we can no longer sustain the ongoing support we previously guaranteed.
Fraternidad Trans Masculina Perú
Where people avoid public systems because of stigma, criminalization, or fear, community-led organizations are not an optional add-on to the health system. They are often the only pathway to care at all.
Intersex health
For intersex communities, the most pressing priority is protection from medical violence: in many countries, intersex infants and children are subjected to medically unnecessary surgeries without their consent. The organizations working to end these practices are among the most underresourced in the movement, and several have suspended documentation, provider education, and family support. In Zimbabwe, an organization that covered most of the cost of diagnostic tests and treatment for intersex children saw that support collapse.
Until recently, we were able to carry out essential actions, such as collecting data on innate variations in sex characteristics, producing educational materials, and providing initial support to intersex people and their families. With the reduction in financial resources, it has become extremely difficult to maintain even a minimal presence.
Intersex Human Rights Angola
Across HIV services, mental healthcare, and intersex health, the pattern is the same. The service and the trust that made it usable were built together over years and are being lost together in months.
Quote from Manisha Dhakal
“Most difficult moment was telling them we had to close the clinic and [telling] everyone their jobs are gone. You have to go home.”
Part 2 · 07
Economic precarity and lost pathways to stability
The cuts deliver a dual blow: people of queer experience face worsening economic vulnerability, while the programs that helped them build stability (livelihoods, vocational training, small business support, employment, and education) are being reduced or suspended. Loss of income increases exposure to homelessness, violence, exploitation, interrupted healthcare, and food insecurity. Among organizations that reduced livelihood programs, 88% operate amid high poverty or inequality and 76% amid high anti-LGBTIQ violence.
39%
reduced, suspended, or discontinued economic livelihoods or employment programs
58%
reported increased poverty or economic precarity among the people they work with
At the start of 2025, the Trinidad and Tobago Transgender Coalition (3TC) experienced a significant setback with the loss of funding from Outright International—our first major grant. The grant supported a structured program, focused on economic empowerment for people of trans experience…The loss of this funding halted critical progress, leaving many without access to training opportunities that could have strengthened their financial independence and long-term stability.
Trinidad and Tobago Transgender Coalition (3TC)
3TC’s grant ended after Outright, its intermediary funder, lost funding from the USAID Alliance for Global Equality program.
Conectando Derechos is a very young, volunteer-based organization. Against the backdrop of an economic crisis, the loss of the limited funding they had expected placed a heavy burden on the volunteers. Some held multiple jobs, while others had to focus on their primary job amid mass layoffs. This resulted in a one-year delay in a project aimed at the economic empowerment of 150 LGBTI women.
Conectando Derechos, Argentina
Yayasan Kebaya Yogyakarta, a trans women-led organization founded in 2006, combines HIV care and shelter with economic empowerment: group and individual businesses, entrepreneurship training, a cooperative of around 38 members extending small loans, and exhibitions where trans women sell their work. Support channeled through Outright had driven its growth after 2023.
Its operational accounts are now empty, and it can pay only three of its previously 11 team members. Training that ran twice a week may now happen once every two months. Its more than 100 beneficiaries receive far less assistance, shelter support has been reduced, and the number of trans women business owners is falling. Its program manager posed the question the crisis has imposed: “How do we stand on our own without support of funders or the government?”
Raise Your Voice Saint Lucia built a skills-training and micro-enterprise pathway into hospitality and food jobs, with wraparound support for transport, food, counseling, legal aid, and medical care. Of the first cohort of 22 participants, 21 entered employment or started small businesses, including two people who had been almost homeless; one now works the front office of one of the biggest hotels, and another runs a cocktail business, has hired two people, and made a donation to say thank you.
The cuts hit mid-cohort. Raise Your Voice reprogrammed, fundraised locally, and secured emergency support from the local utilities company to finish. A small Outright grant keeps the program alive, but the second cohort was cut from 22 to 11 so each person could still receive the full six-to-eight-month package. The 11 left out remain in the precarity it was designed to end.
21 of 22
first-cohort participants entered employment or started small businesses
22 → 11
second cohort halved so each participant could still receive full support
A stable income is often what stands between people and far more dangerous arrangements: unsafe work, housing that depends on someone who can exploit them, a violent home. Staff and volunteers are also taking extra jobs or covering costs out of pocket. Funding cuts are turning an organizational funding crisis into a population-level economic crisis.
Part 2 · 08
Weakened advocacy, documentation, and political voice
Advocacy, documentation, and political participation are how queer movements address the structural causes of violence, discrimination, criminalization, and exclusion. When organizations can no longer monitor violations, support strategic litigation, engage policymakers, or communicate with the public, the movement loses part of its capacity to contest harmful laws, defend existing rights, and push for long-term change.
55%
reduced, suspended, or discontinued law and policy advocacy work
38%
reduced, suspended, or discontinued documentation or monitoring of human rights violations
In Malawi, where same-sex conduct is criminalized, Nyasa Rainbow Alliance said the loss of funding has weakened its ability to influence policy changes that protect LGBTIQ people. In Peru, Promsex was affected by suspensions from at least two U.S.-based intermediaries. Victory Institute lost State Department funding for its Latin American LGBTIQ Political Leadership Meeting, which “was ultimately held in Lima, funded by the participants themselves,” and a stop-work order to the National Endowment for Democracy cut Promsex’s work raising awareness of the Anti-NGO Law, “particularly the crackdown on LGBTI organizations.” In Colombia, Caribe Afirmativo ended its work supporting Venezuelan migrants and scaled back political participation initiatives.
We have struggled to inform and raise awareness among the public, losing opportunities to bring [trans people’s human rights] to light in the Chilean media. The result is that these issues are becoming increasingly overlooked.
A queer-led organization, Chile, in an electoral year
Pressure extends to “success stories.” Taiwan Equality Campaign, central to winning same-sex marriage in 2019 (the first in Asia, via a special law rather than the civil code), lost a German government commitment after Germany cut its aid budget and a U.S.-funded project frozen after an advance payment, while administrative delays block domestic fundraising, leaving it close to “no money by the end of this year.” “Lots of people will think, oh, you already have equality, so we don’t need to fight for anything more,” its deputy director said, as it presses for IVF access for lesbian couples and single women and for antidiscrimination protections.
We can no longer maintain an observatory on violence against transgender people in Latin America, let alone the workshops and capacity-building courses for transgender organizations that focused on economic empowerment, leadership development, and other topics.
Red de Colectivos Americanos de Hombres Trans y Personas Asignadas al Género Femenino al Nacer
Colectivo TLGB brings together some 50 affiliated organizations and has coordinated Bolivia’s National Pride March since 2013. For almost eight years it sustained Zona Rosa, a radio program reaching approximately 500,000 people every Saturday. The cuts eliminated committed resources and the program went off the air, amid growing resistance to comprehensive sexuality education and the reported elimination of La Paz’s municipal sexual diversity unit (which the mayor characterizes as a restructuring).
Travel, in-person accompaniment, coordination meetings, and connectivity stipends that sustained trust with groups beyond La Paz, Cochabamba, and Santa Cruz are gone; communication has become administrative rather than substantive. Its digital protection agenda, including advocacy for a digital rights law, was interrupted in a country where online harassment has been used against trans candidates.
That accompaniment reached isolated older LGBTIQ people. During the pandemic the organization found three older people of queer experience who had died alone at home; more recently, an older community leader died after a period of isolation, and the organization could not reach her distant city. It had also pushed the Ministry of Health to launch Bolivia’s PrEP pilot:
The PrEP program in Bolivia is a small pilot that we pushed to get started. The pilot only covers 200 people, and those places are already taken. People who want to begin PrEP now have no medication and no accompaniment. When we raise this with the government, they tell us there is no money to buy the medication, that other issues have to be prioritized.
Colectivo TLGB Bolivia
SOS Solidarity Rights and Health runs community-led monitoring, in which affected communities systematically track whether health services are delivered without discrimination.
As part of the CLM project, we have been forced to reduce the number of LGBTI field investigators involved in monitoring the quality of care provided to the LGBTI community at health facilities and community organizations. This decision resulted from the closure of certain community programs, such as HIV prevention projects within LGBTI organizations, as well as the layoff of PEPFAR staff at several health facilities where LGBTI individuals were treated.
SOS Solidarity Rights and Health, Cameroon
Documentation and advocacy depend on each other. Without documentation, there is less evidence for policy proposals, legal claims, media work, and accountability; without advocacy capacity, evidence is less likely to shape law and public debate. Where anti-equality laws and misinformation are intensifying, organizations need more capacity, yet many are being forced to narrow their work to immediate survival.
Part 2 · 09
Compounded impacts on the most marginalized
The consequences are not evenly distributed. The deepest impacts fall on people facing multiple, overlapping forms of marginalization, for whom LGBTIQ organizations are often one of the few systems that recognized their needs at all.
Who is bearing the deepest impacts
Constituencies most affected, as identified by the 203 affected organizations
71%
trans, nonbinary, and gender-diverse people
61%
lesbian, bisexual, and queer women
50%
people living with HIV
49%
gay, bisexual, and queer men
48%
youth
31%
refugees, asylum seekers, or displaced people
31%
sex workers
27%
people with disabilities
25%
intersex people
Due to reduced financial resources, Key Watch Ghana has been forced to lay off approximately 50% of its staff…Previously, the organization provided essential services, including community education on intersex variations, sensitization of healthcare providers, and direct psychosocial support for intersex children and their families. However, these activities have now come to a halt. At present, there are no active services available specifically targeting intersex children—leaving many without access to guidance, protection, or support in contexts where stigma and harmful practices remain prevalent.
Key Watch Ghana and Intersex Movement Ghana
Among the 55 affected organizations that named LGBTIQ people with disabilities among those hit hardest:
76%
reported that LGBTIQ people with disabilities lost access to health or mental health services
74%
reported increased poverty or economic precarity among them
74%
reported reduced community spaces or support networks for them
Budget cuts have directly impacted our ability to maintain safe spaces for LGBTIQ [young women and adolescents], particularly those living with disabilities and in situations of displacement. For example, certain psychosocial support and protection activities have been suspended, leaving beneficiaries without support as they face situations of violence and exclusion…This illustrates how budget cuts not only reduce programs but directly compromise the safety, dignity, and fundamental rights of marginalized LGBTIQ people.
An organization working with young women and girls with disabilities, Central Africa
For LGBTIQ youth, cuts can mean the loss of education support, community spaces, mental healthcare, and leadership opportunities. For sex workers, reduced harm reduction, safety networks, and emergency funds. For people living with HIV, reduced prevention, testing, adherence support, and food assistance.
The main point is that intersex movements have never been adequately funded. We have always operated in a state of crisis. This is demonstrated by the fact that, until 2025, we functioned entirely on a voluntary basis, with no resources for our activities other than project-based partnerships with government institutions. But [funding is] now even more scarce.
Intersexo Brasil
These are movements that never had a stable base to lose. The cuts hit while they were still trying to build one.
Members of a queer refugee organization in a Ugandan camp are refugees, with restricted mobility and scarce livelihoods, and people of queer experience under a 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act that imposes some of the harshest penalties in the world, including the death penalty for some consensual conduct. Before the cuts, the association offered rights awareness, HIV and primary health support for around 50 members living with HIV, counseling, security training, vocational activities, and emergency relocation.
Now it runs on unpaid volunteers and small contributions that buy painkillers or first-aid supplies. About six trainings a year have largely ceased. Emergency relocation has ended, so people who are assaulted remain where the violence occurred. A planned LGBTIQ-friendly health center was canceled before it began:
The doctors and nurses there know us and can easily identify that you are part of the LGBT community. And when you are, there is discrimination…I was told we could find funding for a small center where we could treat our members, but the project was cut before it could begin.
A queer refugee association, Uganda
In February 2026, according to the association, a senior settlement official threatened to shut it down for “promoting homosexuality.” Staff abandoned the office rather than risk arrest and now work from a cramped room in a member’s home. Defunding and repression have converged on the same population at the same time.
Youth LEAD Mongolia works with people of queer experience aged 15 to 30. It lost 30 to 40% of its grant support and went from two full-time staff and a finance officer to a single unpaid executive director. Its LBQ program, launched in 2024, could not obtain renewed funding in 2025: “LBQ-specific funding is always difficult, competing with LGBT and feminist funding.” Queerphobic narratives strengthened in early 2025 around family law debates (“We observed men in power utilizing Trump’s rhetoric around these issues to attack LGBT communities”), and fewer people, especially LBQ women, now come to gatherings where belonging begins.
The more marginalized the community, the more likely it is that LGBTIQ organizations are not one support system among many, but one of the few accessible and affirming systems available. Funding cuts are deepening inequality within LGBTIQ communities.
Quote from Breaking Point
“The more marginalized the community, the more likely it is that LGBTIQ organizations are one of the few accessible and affirming systems available.”
Part 2 · 10
Outlook: organizations at risk of disappearing
The cuts are calling into question whether many organizations will exist a year from now. 36% of affected organizations said they are likely or very likely to be forced to close entirely within the next 12 months. Asked to describe their outlook, 96% reported being at some level of risk.
10%
immediate risk
of affected organizations face an immediate risk of closure.
30%
severe risk
describe themselves as at severe risk.
56%
at risk
are at risk but still functioning.
3%
stable
described their organization as stable.
Risk concentrates where cuts were deepest and cushions thinnest: among organizations that lost more than half their budget, 46% expect closure to be likely or very likely, and the same share among those operating on under US$50,000 a year. For these groups, losing a single grant is a threat to their existence. Many have not offset the cuts at all, with applications pending and no confirmed outcome.
Staff layoffs have impacted the operations of the organisation and exposed the LGBTQ communities that we support to stigma and discrimination, the office is operating with barely any budget and the rate of HIV infections has spiked.
An organization at immediate risk of closure, Kenya
Since January 2025, we have not been able to identify or secure new sources of funding to offset the cuts made to programs related to the LGBTQI+ community. We are currently continuing to explore funding opportunities, but so far, no new grants have been secured.
An organization, Paraguay
The Lesbian and Gay Association of Liberia (LEGAL) worked across advocacy, access to justice, HIV support, outreach, economic empowerment, and emergency protection, in a country that criminalizes consensual same-sex conduct. The cuts removed all of it. All 11 staff were laid off and the office was lost. Unpaid taxes and annual clearances now accumulate; if unmet, LEGAL may lose the legal capacity to operate at all, a disappearance that unfolds through paperwork.
Volunteers continue parts of the work by phone. But its county-level dialogue with chiefs and traditional leaders has largely stopped, plans for a safe home were abandoned, and people in rural areas can no longer reach it. Its home medication delivery for people afraid to visit clinics has collapsed:
A lot of deaths within our community, because most of them are not on their medication anymore. They are not on treatment…In the month of March, we lost two of the clients. We need healthcare. Our people are dying. The worst thing that can crush my heart is when I am sitting at home or somewhere, and I receive a call: “This person died, this person died.” It breaks me.
LEGAL, Liberia
A 2024 bill would make consensual same-sex conduct a felony and criminalize LGBTIQ rights advocacy. LEGAL’s most urgent needs: healthcare continuity first, then safety, then flexible core funding to restore the office, meet registration obligations, and pay the people holding the work together.
A queer-led initiative in Jordan, unnamed for security reasons, has served LGBTIQ people, sex workers, people who use drugs, and people living with HIV since 2016. Cuts in 2025 interrupted its mental health, HIV prevention, and capacity-building programs. Its team shrank to seven people, mostly volunteers; it stopped taking new cases: “We’re operating in survival mode.” Five trained community champions still pass on accurate health information and referrals.
Where these organizations disappear, the loss will not be confined to a single organization: in many contexts they are among the few, sometimes the only, sources of affirming services, protection, documentation, and community. The coming year will be decisive. Without renewed and flexible support, the cuts that began in 2025 risk hardening into a lasting contraction of LGBTIQ movements worldwide.
Quote from A queer-led initiative
“I’m very worried we have to close the office. If we do that, we’re closing the last initiative in Jordan serving these communities.”
Part 3 · Impact Beyond the Movement
Capacity that has simply stopped existing
The arrangement was invisible while it worked. It becomes visible now, as the institutions that depended on it discover which parts of their own mandates were being carried by someone else’s grant.
The organizations documented in Part 2 performed functions that other institutions relied on, counted toward their own results, and often financed only indirectly, if at all.
Beyond the movement · 01
Public health loses its reach and its evidence
A national health system reaches the people who can present themselves at a public facility without risking arrest, exposure, or humiliation. Where that fails, people do not stop needing treatment; they stop being visible. Community-led organizations closed that distance, financed largely from outside the health budgets whose targets they helped meet. Interrupted treatment, drug resistance, and undetected transmission move through whole populations. Community organizations also produced much of what health systems knew (case records, referral data, peer insight), so the shortfall will be measured against a baseline that no longer describes the country.
Beyond the movement · 02
Civic space narrows for everyone
Laws restricting foreign funding, tightening registration, or penalizing “promotion” are often argued in the language of protecting national values from sexual and gender diversity, and drafted to reach civil society as a whole. Queer organizations are the first tested. Once the precedent holds, it is available against journalists, women’s rights organizations, environmental groups, and any internationally funded nonprofit. Defunding the most exposed organizations removes the litigation, documentation, and early warning the rest of the sector draws on.
Beyond the movement · 03
Precedent crosses borders
Legislators borrow drafting from one another, so a restriction that survives in one jurisdiction arrives in the next already tested. The organizations able to describe how such laws work once in force are the ones losing funding. They also supply much of what reaches UN mechanisms and regional human rights bodies, which act on what they receive; a thinner record is not read as thinner reporting. And where donors treat LGBTIQ work as a liability, organizations begin editing their own proposals, and the space narrows without any law being passed.
Beyond the movement · 04
Withdrawal sends a signal
Campaigns against “gender ideology” have become an organizing frame for movements contesting courts, the press, international human rights obligations, and the principle that minorities hold rights a majority cannot vote away. Hostility toward queer people is mobilized at low political cost, making LGBTIQ organizations an early indicator of where a broader project is heading. Governments watching a donor retreat from a 15-year commitment draw conclusions about what it was worth, and officials who took domestic risks on the strength of that partnership are left explaining why.
Beyond the movement · 05
Development commitments quietly fall short
Development and humanitarian institutions pledge to reach the people furthest behind. That requires partners trusted enough to receive disclosures that would be dangerous anywhere else, capacity built with money now withdrawn. Programs continue and reports are filed while unreached populations drop out of the figures, so the shortfall registers nowhere. Mainstream intake systems inherit the work without the trust, people disclose only what is safe, and underreporting is read as evidence that the need was smaller than claimed.
Beyond the movement · 06
Economies and companies pay too
Exclusion imposes costs on national economies: labor lost to discrimination, human capital left undeveloped, avoidable health expenditure. Companies recruit from these populations, need predictable rules and functioning courts, and implement their inclusion commitments through local organizations, much of it financed by the terminated programs. Skilled workers who can leave countries that criminalize them do leave, and investors read legal volatility toward any minority as information about the rules in general.
The case for funding queer movements rests on the rights and lives documented in the preceding sections. The cuts were also a miscalculation on their authors’ own terms: this funding was presented as spending on a narrow constituency, and much of it was paying for capacity other institutions had stopped noticing they used. The institutions that depended on it will encounter the gap in their own results before they trace it back to a decision they did not make.
Quote from Breaking Point
“That capacity has not been reassigned. It has simply stopped existing.”
The organizations in this report are holding the line under extraordinary constraint: staff working unpaid for months, communities pooling money to cover legal aid, and services sustained by volunteers through community structures built over years. Much has already been lost. What survives is harder to see and harder to destroy: the knowledge, relationships, and community structures that made the work possible. That is what funding can still sustain, and what rebuilding would have to start from.
Critical Actions
Five critical actions
Resilience cannot substitute for resources, and it is being spent down.
CRITICAL ACTION 01
Act immediately, outside standard grant cycles.
The closure timeline documented here is measured in months, a pace that annual funding cycles were never built to match. Emergency and bridge funding should move while there are still organizations left to fund.
CRITICAL ACTION 02
Provide multi-year, flexible funding.
Support should be usable for staff, operations, and reserves, so organizations can absorb funding shifts. Funding strategies should not depend on any single government’s continued support, nor on assumptions about what other donors will keep covering.
CRITICAL ACTION 03
Restore community-led health services.
The U.S. withdrawal left HIV prevention and treatment for key populations unfunded, and community-led organizations are often the only providers that sexual and gender minorities can access safely.
CRITICAL ACTION 04
Fund protection directly.
Emergency response, shelters and safe houses, and relocation capacity require dedicated funding lines, and LGBTIQ organizations should be included in humanitarian response mechanisms.
CRITICAL ACTION 05
Direct resources to those bearing the heaviest impacts.
Trans and gender-diverse people and lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ) women were named most often among the hardest hit. Flexible funding should keep flowing to grassroots organizations, including through the intermediary channels many depend on.
Recommendations
Recommendations for key constituents
How we sustain critical organizations
The findings in this report point to an urgent need not only to address the damage caused by recent funding cuts, but to build a stronger and more resilient funding model for global LGBTIQ movements. That means sustaining critical organizations whose loss would leave major gaps in services, protection, advocacy, or movement capacity, restoring essential health and protection services, and expanding and diversifying the resources available to movements so they are less vulnerable to political shifts, donor concentration, and chronic underinvestment.
The goal should not be to recreate the funding landscape that existed before January 2025. It should be to build one that is larger, more diverse, more flexible, and able to reach organizations operating where LGBTIQ people face the greatest barriers.
To donor governments:
- Sustain community-led health services, including HIV prevention and treatment for key populations. Half of the affected organizations in this survey reduced or discontinued health services, including mental health and sexual and reproductive healthcare, and 45% have reduced or stopped HIV prevention, treatment, or care. Community-led organizations are often the most effective and sometimes the only way to reach people who avoid mainstream health systems because of stigma, discrimination, criminalization, or fear of exposure. Funding national health systems alone will not close these gaps.
- Fund emergency response and protection as a dedicated priority. Nearly two-thirds of affected organizations report being unable to respond to emergencies involving violence, arrests, displacement, or urgent relocation. Governments should provide dedicated funding for emergency grants, shelters and safe houses, relocation, legal assistance, psychosocial support, and other immediate protection needs.
- Include LGBTIQ organizations in humanitarian funding and response. In crisis and conflict settings, these organizations often serve as first responders, reaching people whom mainstream humanitarian systems miss or exclude. They should be eligible for direct humanitarian funding and meaningfully included in coordination and response mechanisms.
- Protect advocacy and documentation. Maintain funding for legal reform, monitoring of violations, strategic litigation, and participation in national and international policy processes. This is the work that addresses the root causes of the needs described above, and it is shrinking: 55% of affected organizations reported reduced legal and policy advocacy, and 38% reduced human rights documentation. Without this work, organizations lose the ability to address the laws, policies, and institutional practices that contribute to the harms documented in this report.
- Base funding decisions on the conditions LGBTIQ people face, not national income level alone. Gross domestic product (GDP) is one important indicator of need, but this report shows that violence, discrimination, weak access to justice, criminalization, restrictions on civil society, and the availability of domestic funding alternatives also determine where international support is most needed. Funding strategies should therefore include countries across income levels where LGBTIQ people face serious barriers or where opportunities for progress could be lost without sustained support.
To institutional donors and philanthropic actors:
- Act quickly when organizations face immediate risk. Thirty-six percent of affected organizations say they are likely or very likely to close within the next 12 months, and only 3% described themselves as stable. Donors with the ability to provide emergency or bridge funding should not require organizations facing imminent closure to wait for the next annual grant cycle.
- Provide funding that can keep organizations functioning, not only projects running. Among survey respondents, 71% of affected organizations have laid off staff or cut pay, and 49% lost more than half their budgets. Grants should allow organizations to pay staff, rent, finance and compliance costs, technology, security, and other essential operating expenses, and build reasonable reserves where possible.
- Give organizations enough flexibility to respond when circumstances change. Funders should permit reasonable reallocation of funds when emergencies, political changes, or sudden funding losses alter what organizations need. Restrictive project budgets can leave organizations with funding on paper while preventing them from using it for urgent staff, protection, or operational needs.
- Fund cross-movement work alongside LGBTIQ-specific organizations, and make inclusion a condition of that funding. Many of the people most affected by the cuts—refugees and displaced people, sex workers, people living with HIV, people with disabilities—depend on services provided by allied organizations working on migration, humanitarian response, and health. As those services collapse, their caseloads are shifting onto LGBTIQ groups that are themselves losing capacity. But funding the broader ecosystem is not enough on its own: this report documents shelters turning away sexual and gender minorities under political pressure, humanitarian response plans that exclude them, and mainstream health facilities they cannot safely use. Donors should require explicit inclusion of LGBTIQ people in the ecosystem work they fund, follow up on whether it is delivered, and treat exclusion as a compliance failure rather than a local inevitability.
- Build funding strategies that do not rest on any single government’s continued support. The dependence many organizations had on one government’s funding is what made a single policy decision capable of dismantling years of accumulated support in a matter of days. Donors should assess concentration risk across their portfolios and help organizations diversify their funding rather than assuming another donor will continue covering essential costs. This also applies to donor assumptions about what other donors will keep covering.
- Sustain the intermediary infrastructure that moves resources to local organizations. More than half of all grants to LGBTIQ movements in the Global South and East travel through intermediary funders, and this report documents what happens downstream when those channels are destabilized. When those mechanisms disappear, small, grassroots, and unregistered organizations may lose the only funding channels available to them.
To intermediary funders:
- Pass as much flexibility as possible to grantees, and negotiate upstream for more. Intermediaries should avoid adding restrictions that make already-limited funding harder to use and should advocate with their own donors for terms that allow local organizations to respond to changing circumstances. Organizations in this report described holding funds they could not use for the person in front of them.
- Make emergency reallocation and bridge support easier. Where possible, intermediaries should allow existing grantees to redirect funds toward urgent operating, staffing, health, or protection needs rather than requiring them to continue activities that are no longer the highest priority.
- Protect grantee data. Personal information collected through a grant can put staff and activists at risk if exposed. Funders and intermediaries must continue protecting that data even after the grant ends.
- Preserve small and flexible grants to grassroots groups. These groups do work that no other actor can replicate. They serve people invisible to formal systems—communities in hidden or remote locations, young LBQ mothers, sex workers, people afraid to enter a clinic or a police station—because they hold trust those systems lack. Many are unregistered or cannot meet the administrative requirements attached to larger grants. Intermediaries should preserve funding mechanisms designed for these organizations rather than shifting resources exclusively toward larger grants and organizations. When this channel closes, no other replaces it.
To the corporate sector:
- Reconsider funding decisions made under political pressure. Corporate giving to LGBTIQ organizations has retrenched alongside government and philanthropic funding, often quietly and without the scrutiny that government cuts received. Waiting for the political climate to shift before re-engaging prolongs damage that is already measurable. Visibility and funding are separate decisions: companies that judge public association too risky right now can still provide consistent funding, match employee donations, support trusted intermediary funds, and continue partnerships quietly rather than withdrawing altogether, and re-engage publicly as soon as they are able.
- Fund without requiring public visibility or branding. Companies should offer grants that do not depend on logos, public campaigns, events, or promotional recognition. In hostile environments, low-profile support may be safer, more useful, and more responsive to what organizations actually need.
- Use corporate funding for needs that other donors may struggle to cover. Flexible corporate funding can be particularly useful for staff, organizational operations, emergency response, small grants, and other needs that more restricted government funding may not support.
Quote from Rodolfo Vargas
“The message I would give to donors is not to think only in administrative terms, but to think about the protection they provide, the participation they support, and the lives they are helping to defend and to dignify.”
Glossary
Key terms used in this report
The word bisexual often refers to people who are attracted to women and men and/or to people who are attracted to more than one gender.
Short-term funding intended to cover a gap between grants or other funding streams, helping an organization maintain operations or services before longer-term funding is secured.
Denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds with their sex assigned at birth.
A synonym for homosexual in many parts of the world. In this report, gay is used specifically to refer to the sexual orientation of a man whose primary sexual and/or romantic attraction is toward other men.
The social and cultural codes (linked to but not congruent with ideas about biological sex) used to distinguish between society’s conceptions of “femininity” and “masculinity.”
Any type of violence that is perpetrated against a person or group of people because of their actual or perceived sex, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, sex characteristics, or any perceived violation of gender norms.
A broad term used to refer to people whose gender identities or expressions fall outside dominant social expectations, including people who may not identify specifically as transgender or nonbinary.
How we express our gender through actions and appearance, including attire, speech, and movement. Gender expression is on a spectrum. It can align with social constructs of what it means to be feminine, masculine, androgynous, or any combination thereof. It can also be fluid. A person’s gender expression is not always linked to the person’s biological sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation.
A person’s internal, deeply felt sense of being a woman or girl, a man or boy, a combination of these, neither, or something else.
Behaving or appearing in ways that do not fully conform to social expectations based on one’s assigned sex.
The sexual orientation of a person whose primary sexual and/or romantic attraction is toward men, if they are women, and toward women, if they are men.
Fear of, contempt of, and/or discrimination against homosexuals or homosexuality, usually based on negative stereotypes of homosexuality. Homophobia can be both individual and institutional. Entrenched damaging opinions about same-sex attraction may influence the enactment of discriminatory laws and policies, and how individuals, the government, organizations, the media, and society in general behave toward people perceived as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer.
The sexual orientation of a person whose primary sexual and/or romantic attractions are toward people of the same sex.
Organizations that receive funding from governments, foundations, or other donors and channel or regrant those resources to other organizations, often including smaller, local, or grassroots groups that may not have direct access to large institutional donors.
An umbrella term that refers to a range of traits and conditions that cause individuals to be born with chromosomes, gonads, and/or genitals that vary from what is considered typical for female or male bodies.
An inclusive term used to categorize people whose identities or bodies do not meet cultural expectations of endosex, cisgender heteronormativity. Outright uses the term LGBTIQ as an umbrella term that includes people who may not themselves identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer. This can include “people of queer experience,” and, in certain contexts, “sexual and gender minorities.”
Terms to describe those males who engage in sexual activity with other males, regardless of their personal sexual orientation or identity.
A term to describe the gender identity of someone who does not identify exclusively as a woman or girl or as a man or boy. This term is sometimes used interchangeably with the term “genderqueer.”
The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief is a U.S. health funding mechanism designed to address the global HIV/AIDS epidemic, created in 2003 and funded through annual congressional appropriations.
Pre-exposure prophylaxis is medication taken by people who do not have HIV to reduce their risk of acquiring HIV.
An inclusive umbrella term covering multiple identities, sometimes used interchangeably with “LGBTIQ,” as “people of queer experience” or “queer people.” It is also used to describe divergence from heterosexual and cisgender norms without specifying new identity categories. In this report, “queer men” is used to cover gay men, bisexual men, and other men of non-heterosexual sexual orientations, and “queer women” is used to cover lesbian women, bisexual women, and other women of non-heterosexual sexual orientations.
The practice by which an organization receives funding from a donor and subsequently distributes some or all of those resources as grants to other organizations or groups.
A category of individuals whose sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, or sex characteristics differ from those of most of the population. In certain contexts, this can be used interchangeably with “LGBTIQ people” and “people of queer experience.”
The sexual, romantic, and emotional attraction that one has the capacity to feel for others. An individual’s sexual orientation is indicated by one or more of the following: how a person self-identifies their sexual orientation, a person’s capacity for experiencing sexual and/or affectional attraction to people of the same and/or different gender, and/or a person’s sexual behavior with people of the same and/or different gender. People have diverse sexual orientations, including those who experience little to no sexual attraction.
A term to describe people whose sex assigned at birth does not conform to their gender identity. A transgender person usually adopts, or would prefer to adopt, a gender expression in accordance with their gender identity, but may or may not desire to alter their physical characteristics to conform to their gender identity.
People designated female at birth but who identify and may present themselves as men. Transgender men are generally referred to with male pronouns.
People designated male at birth but who identify and may present themselves as women. Transgender women are generally referred to with female pronouns.
With thanks
Acknowledgments
This report was researched and written by Alberto de Belaunde, Director of Queer Legal Futures, with additional research and writing by Andrew Park, Senior Advisor, Inclusive Development. Rasha Younes and Lucas Ramón Mendos, external consultants, conducted interviews and drafted case studies. Neela Ghoshal, Senior Director for Law, Policy, and Research, and Maria Sjödin, Executive Director at Outright, reviewed and edited the report. Venus Aves, Research and Program Associate, proofread it, while Lui Iarocheski, Director of Marketing and Communications, provided the design.
Outright is deeply grateful to the LGBTIQ activists and organizations in 94 countries who shared their experiences with us through interviews and surveys. They gave their time at a moment when their own work is under strain, trusting that what they told us might help change the conditions they described. Outright will continue to work in solidarity with them.
About the cover
The cover is a design based on a photograph by Ray Valle Nagashiro (Instagram: @Rayvallnag), adapted by Outright International and combined with the organization’s own graphic elements.
On May 31, 2025, the National Day to Combat Violence and Hate Crimes Against Lesbians, Trans People, Gays, and Bisexuals, activists gathered outside the Palace of Justice in Lima to weave the Quipu de la Memoria, as they have each year for two decades. A quipu is an Andean recording device, a cord hung with knotted strings, used by the Inca state to count its people, tribute, harvests, and dead. Taken up by LGBTIQ activists around the work of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, each knot is now tied for a person killed because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, their name read aloud: an act of remembrance and of record-keeping at once, held up against a state that has never counted these deaths itself.
Photograph © Ray Valle Nagashiro. Cover design by Outright International, based on and adapted from the original photograph.
About Outright
Outright International works with partners around the globe to strengthen the LGBTIQ human rights movement, document and amplify human rights violations against LGBTIQ people, and advocate for inclusion and equality.
Founded in 1990, Outright works with civil society organizations, the United Nations, regional human rights monitoring bodies, governments, humanitarian and development institutions, and philanthropic and corporate partners to create lasting change. With staff in over fifteen countries, Outright holds consultative status at the United Nations, where it serves as the secretariat of the UN LGBTI Core Group.
© 2026 Outright International. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. This work may be reproduced and redistributed, in whole or in part, without alteration, solely for nonprofit administrative or educational purposes, provided all copies contain this statement.