SomaliREN Stakeholder Forum, Day 2 (Co-hosted by Veynuus)

On 25 February 2025 in Mogadishu, Veynuus co-hosted the second day of the SomaliREN Stakeholder Forum, bringing together education leaders, international development partners and policymakers to discuss the future of Somalia's research and education network infrastructure.

Veynuus played a central role in facilitating stakeholder engagement, ensuring that representatives from IOM Somalia, UNESCO East Africa, the African Development Bank and the World Bank's education divisions were brought to the table for a working discussion of partnerships and recommendations rather than a sequence of position statements.

What the forum addressed

The session focused on strengthening collaboration between higher education institutions, government bodies and international organisations, with the aim of building a sustainable and connected research ecosystem in Somalia. Discussions covered infrastructure needs, digital connectivity, the alignment of curricula with market demand, and cross-border academic partnerships.

Research and education network infrastructure is an unglamorous subject that determines a great deal. Shared connectivity and identity systems are what allow a university to reach subscription journals, join a research consortium, run distance teaching at reasonable cost, or take part in an inter-institutional programme without negotiating each connection separately. In a country where individual institutions cannot each carry that cost, the network is the mechanism by which capability becomes affordable. Getting the funders, the regulator and the institutions to describe the same problem in the same terms is the precondition for anything being built.

What co-hosting involved

The organisational work behind a forum of this kind is mostly done before the day. Convening IOM Somalia, UNESCO East Africa, the African Development Bank and World Bank education representatives in one room in Mogadishu means reconciling several institutions' security requirements, approval chains and calendars, and doing so for a session whose value depends on the right people attending rather than on attendance in general.

Facilitation then has to hold the discussion at a useful level. Forums that bring donors and institutions together tend to drift towards either a funding appeal or a progress update, both of which are easier than the conversation actually needed. Veynuus's role on the second day was to keep participants working on the substance — where responsibility sits, what each party can commit to, and which recommendations have an owner attached.

What came out of it

The forum provided a platform for candid exchanges on the challenges facing Somali higher education, from regulatory gaps to funding constraints, and surfaced actionable recommendations that participants committed to carrying forward.

The engagement sits alongside the firm's continuing work on higher education in Somalia, including its forthcoming research on the state of the sector and the first edition of Veynuus Industry Talk. The questions raised at the forum — quality assurance, curriculum relevance, financing and the terms on which international partners engage — are the same questions that work takes up in more detail.