Pride works brings you a panel with Justine Greening MP, Dr S Chelvan, Bisi Alimi, Dr Frank Mugisha and Susie Jolly

This high calibre panel will share their views on:

What will LGBT rights look like in 10 years? And how can CDC and other development finance institutions (DFIs) be an agent for transformation?

Evening programme:

18:15 – 18:30 Arrival & Introduction

18:30 – 19:20 Panel discussion

19:20 – 19:50 Q&A

19:50 – 20:00 Vote of thanks

20:00 – 21:30 Networking drinks

Who are the panellists?

Justine Greening MP

Justine is MP for Putney, Roehampton and Southfields. She’s a familiar figure for CDC as she was appointed in 2012 as Secretary of State for International Development. In that role, she led the UK’s efforts in Sierra Leone to combat Ebola, where CDC played a key role in supporting businesses that would have otherwise struggled to survive. Most recently, Justine served as Minister for Women and Equalities. In June 2016, Justine revealed that she was in a same-sex relationship.

Dr S Chelvan

S Chelvan is a specialist in international human rights and LGBT asylum cases. He is a barrister at No5 Barristers’ Chambers and has recently been appointed to UK Government Equalities Office’s LGBT Advisory Panel. S Chelvan is globally recognised as a legal expert on refugee and human rights claims based on sexual, or gender, identity and expression. He is instructed on cases in the UK up to, and including, the Supreme Court and the Strasbourg Court. He has practised in the field of LGBT+ asylum since 2001 and has earned a reputation for being the leading legal expert in the UK on this issue, spearheading some of the most prominent cases since 2005, as well as providing consultation to the United Nations, the IOM, regional and national government organisations and bodies, lawyers and NGOs. He has a PhD in Law from King’s College.

Bisi Alimi

Bisi Alimi is a Nigerian gay rights activist, public speaker, blog writer and HIV/LGBT advocate, who gained international attention when he became the first Nigerian to come out on television. Prior to his public self-outing, Bisi began his advocacy career in the late 1990s in Nigeria when several his friends died from HIV/AIDS. After two years of community mobilisation work for gay men and men who have sex with other men (MSM) in Nigeria, he joined Alliance Rights Nigeria (ARN) in 2002 as Programme Director. In his capacity as ARN Programme Director, he was at the heart of developing the Nigerian MSM HIV prevention framework in 2004. In 2005, he co-founded The Independent Project (later, The Initiative for Equal Rights) working as its Executive Director. In April 12, 2007 he was forced to flee Nigeria following threats to his life. He was granted asylum in 2009 by the UK, where he has been resident since. From 2007 to 2011, Alimi worked as African MSM Project Co-ordinator at Naz Project London. Alimi is currently the Executive Director of Bisi Alimi Foundation and a co-founder and director of Rainbow Intersection, as well as co-founder of The Kaleidoscope Trust for which he served as Director for Africa from 2012 to 2013. He has been a visiting lecturer at Freie Universitat Berlin and is still a lecturer at Humboldt University of Berlin. Bisi earned a master’s degree in Global Governance and Public Policy at Birkbeck University in London.

Dr Frank Mugisha

Dr Frank Mugisha is a Ugandan LGBT advocate and Executive Director of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), who has won the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award and Thorolf Rafto Memorial Prize 2011 for his activism. Mugisha is one of the most prominent advocates for LGBT rights in Uganda. While still at university in 2004, he founded Icebreakers Uganda, an organisation created as a support network for LGBT Ugandans who are out or in the process of coming out to family and friends. Mugisha is now the executive director of SMUG, an umbrella organization that consists of eighteen groups, including Icebreakers Uganda. 
Mugisha was close friends with fellow advocate and SMUG founder David Kato, who was murdered in January 2011 after successfully suing a tabloid named Rolling Stone for publishing the names of 100 LGBT Ugandans with an encouragement to "hang them". You will recall David Kato from the documentary ‘Call me Kuchu’ which Pride works screened in October 2018. 

Writing in The Guardian in 2014, Mugisha argued that homophobia and the hatred behind the Anti-Homosexuality Bill were from western influences: "I am a gay man. I am also Ugandan. There is nothing un-African about me. Uganda is where I was born, grew up and call my home. It is also a country in which I have become little more than an unapprehended criminal because of whom I love. I want my fellow Ugandans to understand that homosexuality is not a western import and our friends in the developed world to recognise that the current trend of homophobia is."

Susie Jolly 

Susie is currently an Honorary Associate at the Institute for Development Studies (IDS_, and works as a freelance consultant, researcher, facilitator and trainer on issues of gender and sexuality. From 2010-2017, Susie Jolly led the Ford Foundation gender and sexuality grant making program in China, totalling US$2 million/year, and supported programmes developing Chinese philanthropy, and on China’s global South relations. Before joining Ford, she founded and led the IDS’ Sexuality and Development Programme, which made visible previously unseen connections between sexuality and international development. She has extensive experience communicating sexuality, gender and development issues globally, with six years’ as Gender Communications Officer at the BRIDGE gender information unit, IDS. She has completed numerous consultancies on gender, sexuality, HIV/AIDS and social development, with DFID, Sida, UNDP, UNIFEM, World Bank, Christian Aid and others, in China, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Kenya, Sweden and Norway. She is an experienced researcher, facilitator and trainer on sexuality and gender, and has published widely on these issues.

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