This paper draws on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Accra, Ghana to examine the political practices of queer men - sasoi - involved in HIV and LGBT rights activism. Taking as its starting point debates concerning the 'globalisation' of gay rights and identity, the paper explores how sexual rights discourses shape saso political practices in this setting. Here, the paper delimits some of the terms, phrases, and frames of reference used by activists to articulate queer sexuality. This analysis suggests that the nomenclature of sexual rights has not erased or usurped forms of queer knowledge that are culturally located and produced. Rather, it has been integrated into a rich lexicon of queerness that travels between global and local registers, English and Ghanaian languages, and is deployed by activists in pragmatic and contextual ways. Specifically, concepts of LGBT rights are seen as meaningful when tied to claims that resonate with activists, such as the right to access healthcare or the right to be free from physical violence and abuse. They also provide a valuable strategic framework through which to articulate and challenge abuses, assert rights, and claim citizenship. These dynamics trouble the view that the globalisation of gay rights and identity operates deterministically and instead highlights the agency and productive power of saso sexual politics.

With the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, African countries have at their disposal a "model" for the development of the law of associations, dependent of the defended cause. For political as well as cultural considerations, the system of associations in these countries has only been formally liberalized and remains under strong governmental control.

In this context, the question arises of the possibility for associations to defend causes which remain not only taboo in large sections of society, but which concern acts that are illegal. Thus, abortion and homosexual relations exist in the societies of Cameroon, Morocco and Senegal, but remain largely unacknowledged and even illegal in the three countries studied. Many associations therefore seek to make the general public aware of the problems caused by the repression of abortion and / or gay relations, they carry out campaigns to prompt decision-makers for changes of the laws or their application on these two subjects. Others choose to be less explicit and the game of alliances with international players takes on great importance.

International and national texts show strong ambiguities. Formal guarantees of freedom of association are thus easily circumvented in these countries in order to prohibit the creation and / or functioning of associations whose social purpose does not correspond to socially accepted values. Such limitations therefore force associations to adopt circumvention strategies which will be analyzed and compared in this communication.

A recent study evaluates a social accountability programme in two Ugandan districts. The programme theory of change follows a standard model for social accountability programmes where the engagement and sensitization of citizens through rights training combined with issue prioritization and action planning and interfacing with duty bearers generates countervailing power and results in improved service delivery for family planning. We trace instances of remedy and redress credited to the programme by retrospectively following cases of actual change and aim to determining the 'active ingredients' which enabled this change to take hold. Through the analysis of documents, in-depth interviews and field notes it is revealed that many instances of change do not cohere with the standard programme theories of change or pre-set outcome measurements. For example, an increase in budget for family planning programmes in one district could be traced to the work of one local man who was personally motivated by principles outside of the rights training provided, held a political role, was well connected, engaged with a number of similar local projects and used advocacy activities not anticipated by the programme. We argue that such instances of local adaptation and reinvention and the inability to contain programme effects necessitates a need for a different engagement with progamme measurement and impact evaluation which recognizes the situated nature of local engagement and the challenge in attributing outcomes or drawing causal links between preset programme activities and effects in the evaluation of social interventions related to sexual and reproductive rights and health.

Much research has primarily framed female genital cutting (FGC) as part of a colonial "civilizing mission" that sought to exert control over African women's bodies. My ethnographic research focuses on how Eritrea—recognized as a state by the United Nations in 1993 after a thirty-year war for independence from Ethiopia—operates under the gaze of a rights-preoccupied world that deems it in need of "modernization". Recent anthropological scholarship has critiqued the ways in which contemporary research furthers the colonialist notion that African cultures and human rights are mutually exclusive (Hodžić 2009). They have paid little attention to the multiplicity of voices within countries where FGC is practiced. Building upon Hodžić's work, my project also explores the history of endogenous movements against FGC, and women's rights, in Eritrea. In 2007, the Eritrean government outlawed the practice of female genital 'mutilation'. Since then, the state has sought to 'eradicate' FGC through film screenings, local health workshops, national TV, and other means, and the criminalization of those who support FGC. The questions that orient my research include: how do national actors, from government officials to healthcare workers, construct and politicize female genital 'mutilation'? How do these agendas shape the bodies of Eritrean women, who are often imagined as subjects to be "saved"? In the face of transnational and national projects that claim their bodies as grounds of contestation, how do Eritrean women respond, adopt, and subvert these projects in pursuit of reproductive wellbeing?