Six million people. A young, resourceful region. A generation of work still ahead.

Primary enrollment in the Somali Region is now close to universal, a remarkable achievement for a region where it stood below 10 percent a generation ago. The next challenge is keeping children in school and making sure they learn. Net enrollment falls to 14 percent by Grades 7–8 and 15 percent in secondary school, roughly half the national rate. Fewer girls than boys stay enrolled. Classrooms average 61 pupils per teacher, the highest ratio in the country, and textbooks, water and basic facilities are stretched thin across a vast territory.

Pastoralist families move with the rains, and a fixed school is hard to reach. Each drought and flood empties classrooms: the 2022 drought pushed more than 600,000 children out of school across Ethiopia’s drought-hit regions, and the 2023 floods closed or damaged 227 schools in the Somali Region alone. The result shows up at the end of the pipeline. In 2025, fewer than 500 of the region’s 16,000 Grade 12 candidates reached the 50 percent mark needed for university, a result the regional government has publicly committed to improving.

Roads, clinics, water systems, power lines and factories all need engineers, technicians, nurses and tradespeople. The Somali Region does not yet produce enough of them. Only 10 of its 99 districts have a technical college, against 40 percent of districts nationally, and the colleges that exist fill about a third of their places. Linking what is taught to what employers in the region need is an unfinished task.

The consequence is a paradox of unemployed graduates in a region short of skills. A tracer study at the region’s flagship polytechnic found 29 percent of recent graduates in work. Nationally, fewer than half of university students pass the exit exam. Those who do succeed often leave for Addis Ababa or abroad, and the region loses many of the people it most needs to keep. Giving the region’s own universities and colleges the partners and resources to change this is work SEED wants to share.

About 85 percent of the region’s people live from livestock and rain-fed farming on arid and semi-arid land. Between late 2020 and 2023 the Horn of Africa endured five consecutive failed rainy seasons, the longest drought in its recorded history. In the Somali Region more than 2.1 million animals died, over half the regional herd. Families who had been pastoralists for generations walked hundreds of kilometres to find pasture and arrived with nothing. It takes a pastoralist household at least five years to rebuild a herd after such a loss, and the next drought rarely waits that long.

The knowledge that would make farming and herding more productive and more resilient in dry conditions exists. Too rarely does it reach a Somali herder or farmer in a language they speak, from someone they trust, with the water, inputs and markets needed to act on it. Government and its partners have invested heavily in rangeland, water and resilience; the need remains vast. The region’s multidimensional poverty rate is estimated at 90 percent.

Somalis are traders by history and by temperament, and the region is more integrated into regional markets than any other Ethiopian lowland. Yet almost all of that commerce is small, informal and self-financed. Formal, interest-free finance consistent with the community’s values arrived in Jigjiga only in the last few years, a welcome development that has not yet reached far beyond the towns. Youth unemployment runs near one in five, and close to one in five young women are jobless.

Meanwhile, remittances arrive every month, and most of them sustain households rather than build firms. The region has traders who want to become manufacturers, graduates who want to become employers, and savings at home and abroad looking for a trustworthy way to invest. What is missing is the institution that connects them.