Congress urge World Bank to suspend loans to Uganda

Nearly a dozen members of Congress this week asked the World Bank Group to suspend loans to Uganda in response to the country’s Anti-Homosexuality Act.

U.S. Reps. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), Steven Horsford (D-Nev.), Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), Al Green (D-Texas), Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), Brittany Pettersen (D-Colo.), Wiley Nickel (D-N.C.), Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) and Dina Titus (D-Nev.) and D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton in a letter they sent to World Bank Group President Ajay Banga urged him “to immediately postpone and suspend all current and future lending to Uganda until the recent Anti-Homosexuality Act, signed by President Yoweri Museveni on May 29, 2023, is struck down.”

“While we undoubtedly support efforts to promote long-term economic development and poverty reduction in Uganda, the recent law mandates state-sponsored discrimination and violence against LGBTQ+ individuals, creating a humanitarian crisis that plainly violates World Bank stated policies,” states the letter

The Anti-Homosexuality Act, among other things, contains a provision that calls for the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality.”

The Council for Global Equality, the Human Rights Campaign, Outright International, Rainbow Railroad and Planned Parenthood Global are five of the 170 human rights organizations that urged the World Bank on June 15 to suspend loans to Uganda. The State Department the following day announced the U.S. had imposed visa restrictions against Ugandan officials.

Then-World Bank President Jim Yong Kim in 2014 postponed a $90 million loan to the Ugandan government in response to Museveni’s decision to sign a version of the Anti-Homosexuality Act that did not contain a death penalty provision. (The Constitutional Court later struck down the law on a technicality.)

Kim’s decision to postpone the loan without first consulting the World Bank board sparked widespread criticism among board members. Advocacy groups had asked the World Bank not to fund future projects in Uganda, but they did not ask for the cancellation of existing loans.

“We stand with Ugandan activists, international humanitarian organizations, and the LGBTQ+ community and insist that the bank take swift action to postpone and suspend all lending to Uganda until the law is struck down,” reads the Congress members’ letter to Banga. “Continuing to lend money to Uganda and implement projects in the country would signal to the Ugandan government, other governments considering similar laws and LGBTQ+ people around the world that the World Bank does not truly value inclusion and that its commitments to nondiscrimination are disingenuous. The World Bank can and must do better.”