Over 61% of Nigerians believe LGBTQI people should be allowed equal access to public services such as health care, education and housing. Laws enacted in 2014 makes homosexuality a crime punishable by ten years imprisonment, with 14 years for same-sex marriage and ten years for participating or facilitating a homosexual gathering. Nigerians truly believe that LGBTQI is a western concept, that members of the LGBTQI community are purposefully and actively choosing to act in this manner, and that their proclivities can be undone by pressure, prayer, violence, imprisonment or the threat of death.
This situation puts LGBTQI persons, organizations and human rights defenders at great risk from both state and non state actors who pose the threat of violence to the community. Organizations in the front line who are providing legal, medical and financial support to the community collect a lot of personally identifiable information which is currently stored in a number of problematic ways that are subject to loss, or falling into the wrong hands. This means that we have to minimize the risks of that happening as a way of supporting the work that is happening within the movement.
The project will provide security trainings to a network of LGBTQI organizations in Nigeria, building the capacity of human rights defenders to protect them from digital harm, provide capacity within organizations to maintain and multiply knowledge of organizational safety, documenting the success and failures so that it can be used by other trainers in the infosec community, while looping back and providing feedback to developers of the open source tools which they will use.