With support from the World Bank, Somalia is providing critical resources to drought-induced internally displaced persons (IDPs) flowing into urban centers and improving their access to basic services. Photo: Abdirahman Zeila / World Bank
When I first stepped onto the sandy streets of Hoodale, a new settlement on the edge of Garowe, I was welcomed by a bright orange front door. It’s home to Fatima, a 34-year-old tailor who recently swapped a leaking shack in an informal camp for a small, block-walled house built under the World Bank-supported Somalia Urban Resilience Project II (SURP II).
Fatima invited me inside, where her youngest son was tracing letters in a battered exercise book and a tomato vine was already climbing the courtyard fence. In that moment I was reminded—again—why we insist on applying the World Bank’s Environmental and Social Framework (ESF) to projects, even in places as tough as Somalia.
Cities under pressure, people on the move
Somalia’s urban areas are growing at break-neck speed. Conflict, recurrent droughts and shrinking rural livelihoods have pushed families north, south, and everywhere in between, searching for safety and for work. By early 2025, almost half of Somalia’s 18.2 million people live in towns or cities; many arrive with nothing but tarpaulins and hope. Informal settlements spill across floodplains, rubbish heaps block the few drains that exist, and over-pumped aquifers sink a little lower every year.
Against that backdrop the ESF can look, at first glance, like a luxury. How do you run public consultations when an insurgent checkpoint sits two kilometres down the road? How do you monitor a contractor’s waste disposal if you can’t drive the perimeter without an armoured escort?
Turning a rulebook into a lifeline
SURP II—financed by IDA and implemented by six municipalities—forced us to answer those questions in real time. Our first step was to read the ESF not as a rulebook but as a lifeline: a practical checklist for keeping people safe and for earning their trust.
In Mogadishu, the checklist meant installing borehole meters and capping extraction at 10% below natural recharge, even when the city clamored for more water. In Baidoa it meant lining laterite soil roads with silt fences and fast-growing trees so the next flash flood wouldn’t wash the surface into the Shabelle. In every city it meant training local engineers, many straight out of university, to spot an unsafe scaffold or a missing PPE kit and shut a site until it was fixed.
Most of all, it meant listening. Since 2019 our teams have sat with more than 3,000 residents—sometimes in cramped classrooms, sometimes under thorn trees—to ask where water pools after a storm, which lanes women avoid after dark, and whom the community trusts to mediate grievances. In Garowe, three out of every four participants were women. Their priorities (better lighting, safe walkways to school, quiet hours for construction) now appear verbatim in the contractors’ bills of quantities.
When the river rose
Flexibility is the ESF’s secret weapon. Late last year, El Niño rains burst riverbanks across southern Somalia, submerging whole neighborhoods and displacing another 600,000 people. Because SURP II had a Contingent Emergency Response Component baked into its finance agreement, a few million dollars were released within days. Drainage crews diverted from planned road works to lay temporary beams, install pumps, and dig the first of four urban stormwater retention ponds that now protect 50,000 residents in Mogadishu’s Hodan district. The ESF paperwork was updated on-the-fly so that emergency measures still met labor, land, and pollution standards.
Watching the numbers move
Progress in Somalia is often measured in millimeters, but we are finally seeing the needle move. Third-party monitors—Somali engineers who visit sites unannounced—report that injury rates on our construction projects have fallen by half. Soil loss along Baidoa’s pilot roads is down 40%. In Mogadishu, a good proportion of construction debris is now recycled instead of dumped in drainage ditches. The project’s grievance hotline and WhatsApp bot have closed 97% of the 1,200 cases logged since 2020, everything from blocked shop entrances to allegations of child labor.
Fatima’s front door is part of that story. Her house came with a registered title, something she never imagined owning. Her husband learned masonry on the job and is now adding two rooms at the back. Water from the new standpipe no longer runs through raw sewage; storm drains carry the first flush of rain safely past the doorway.
What Fatima, and Somalia, teach the rest of us
Working in Somalia has left me with four convictions that I carry with me.
First, flexibility is not optional. Without a pre-agreed emergency channel, the recent floods would have brought our entire World Bank portfolio to a standstill.
Third, capacity sticks when it is local. Dozens of municipal staff have completed tiered ESF training; four out of five now audit sites as confidently as any external consultant.
Finally, environmental benefits must be designed, not assumed. Where we planted buffer strips or restored riverbanks, residents reported cooler streets, cleaner air, and fewer waterborne diseases.
The road ahead
Somalia’s urban transition remains fragile. Licensed landfills lag demand, aquifers continue to drop, and political volatility could erase hard-won gains. Yet Fatima’s plot, and thousands like it, offer a glimpse of what is possible when safeguards become practice rather than paperwork.
If we can close existing gaps, we will leave more than asphalt and culverts behind; we will leave a framework for dignity and resilience that can outlast individual projects—and maybe even outlast us. As I left Hoodale, Fatima walked me to that bright orange door and handed me a stitched purse, “for the papers you carry.” It sits on my desk in Lusaka as a daily reminder: when we safeguard people, we safeguard hope.
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