We know that you were one of the 14 people recently  detained in Tanzania, please tell us about this ordeal

First off, I will start by saying thank you to all those that came out and made noise on different social media platforms, it helped a lot for the people to show that kind of solidarity. We truly appreciate everyone who who emailed,  sent messages quietly and those that mounted the pressure to have us released-  I know my team also appreciates this general love.

The organisation I work with focuses on two broad areas,  women’s human rights and sexual rights. With the sexual rights program, we work with the social movements to try and get access to justice by connecting them to lawyers for  legal representation; a lot of groups we work with face a big challenge of getting lawyers who can represent their causes. To counter this, we do capacity strengthening of lawyers especially on the knowledge they need in order to represent these clients effectively.

For the past two years we have been working in Tanzania with the social movement and in the last year, the movement in Tanzania felt they were now able to see themselves as a human rights movement that responds to issues. In recent times, there’s been need for the movement to respond to the ban on lubricants. In 2016, the Tanzanian government banned importation and distribution of lubricants claiming that these promote homosexuality and later, the few available drop in centres that had been initiated by previous governments were closed off.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Please watch the video below for the full interview