What happens when the people trying to help make things worse? In this talk, award-winning journalist Robbie Corey-Boulet — author of Love Falls on Us: A Story of American Ideas and African LGBT Lives — draws on years of on-the-ground reporting across West Africa to explore one of the most uncomfortable questions in human rights work: how well-meaning interventions by Western governments, NGOs, and activists can deepen the very suffering they set out to relieve.
From Cameroon to Côte d’Ivoire to Liberia, Corey-Boulet traces how foreign funding, imported identities, and high-profile advocacy campaigns have created winners and losers among the communities they claim to champion — exposing some to greater danger while leaving others behind entirely.
Robbie Corey-Boulet is the Reuters bureau chief for West and Central Africa, based in Dakar and covering 23 countries from Cape Verde to Congo. He previously worked for Agence France-Presse as bureau chief in Saudi Arabia and correspondent in Ethiopia, covering the 2020-22 war in Tigray. He also reported for the agency from Ukraine, Yemen and Israel and the Palestinian territories.
His latest reporting has focused on how the Trump administration’s cuts to foreign assistance have affected the fight against HIV/AIDS in Africa, with a focus on key populations. He has also extensively covered implementation of the administration’s third-country deportation deals with African governments.
His narrative nonfiction book, Love Falls On Us: A Story of American Ideas and African LGBT Lives, won the 2020 Excellence in Book Writing Award from NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists. It focuses on how LGBT communities in West and Central Africa have been shaped by Western money and activism.
- LGBTQ Student Life at the University of Chicago