CEO of Veynuus Firm, Vision for Africa

Veynuus has published three short films about the firm. They were made at different times and for different reasons, and they are not a series, but they are collected here because between them they answer the three questions the firm is asked most often by people meeting it for the first time: what it is for, where it came from, and what it has actually done.

An editor's note is warranted, because films of this kind are easy to make badly. A young firm in Mogadishu recording a corporate video faces a familiar pull towards the visual language of much larger organisations, and the result usually describes nobody in particular. The brief for all three was the opposite — plain speech, specific claims, and no footage standing in for an argument.

CEO of Veynuus Firm, Vision for Africa

The first film is the founding statement. In it, the firm's chief executive sets out the vision behind Veynuus and its commitment to building across the Horn of Africa. The argument concerns where advisory capability sits. A great deal of the analysis that shapes decisions in Somalia and its neighbours is produced somewhere else, by people who arrive for a fieldwork window and leave with the data. The case made in the film is for the alternative: firms based in the region, staffed by people who live with the consequences of the advice they give, doing work to a standard that does not need to be qualified by where it was produced.

The film exists because that position is easier to hold in person than on a page. A capability statement can list six practice areas without conveying why anyone started the firm in the first place. This one is deliberately about intent rather than services. It also says out loud that Veynuus is female-founded and female-led, which carries weight in this market and which the firm decided should not be left as a line in a document that nobody reads aloud.

Veynuus Firm, Our Story

The second film is an introduction to the firm, its work and the communities it serves. It is the closest of the three to a conventional overview, covering what the practice does across strategic communications and media, research, data and policy, financial advisory, business and trade services, human capital and governance work, and how those areas connect when an engagement is actually running rather than on an organisation chart.

Its purpose is practical. Clients in this market usually meet a firm through a single piece of work — a registration file, a survey, a communications package — and have no picture of what else sits behind it. Ministries and agencies procuring locally have the same problem from the other side: they want to understand who they are contracting before a tender document tells them. The film exists so that the question can be answered in a few minutes rather than in a meeting that has to be scheduled.

Veynuus Firm, Impact Across Emerging Markets

The third film looks at the firm's work across Somalia and neighbouring countries. It is the delivery film: what the practice has done, in which markets, and for whom. Veynuus works with UN agencies, federal ministries and private companies across Somalia, Kenya, Nigeria and adjacent markets, and the value of putting that record in one place is that it can then be judged as a whole rather than one engagement at a time.

It was also made for an internal reason. Work in this region is frequently delivered under a client's name and then absorbed into a programme report, which makes it difficult for a firm to see its own record and impossible for anyone outside to. Documenting delivery is a discipline before it is a marketing exercise: it forces the question of what a piece of work actually changed, which is a harder question than what it produced. The three films are hosted publicly and can be watched in any order, though they read most clearly in the sequence above.