Sexual Minorities Uganda, last week, organized a one day engagement to introduce the idea of creating/forming the Uganda Key Populations Consortium. The consortium is geared towards strengthening and amplifying the voices of the Uganda key populations community with a unified voice.

If agreed upon, UKPC will unite the LGBTQ community, sex workers, persons who use and inject drugs, and truck drivers.  One of their main aims is to ensure that all key populations, even at the rural level, are reached out to and well represented.

According to Richard Lusimbo, one of the people at the who have been working behind the scenes to birth this consortium, the idea to form this confederation arose after the realization that as a community of LGBTI, Sex Workers, PWIDS we continue to face challenges when it comes to programming especially under the HIV program and due to legal barriers and societal, we have remained a population that continuously remains vulnerable.

“UKPC is to be a voice of all KPs and to achieve this, we are planning to hold a national meeting, where we shall all agree how to move forward as a community and how best can we drive this consortium together. The Consortium will be for KPs and led by KPs,” Lusimbo elaborated by email.

The meeting was attended by several individuals that represented the different constituencies of the key populations community.