Somalia Federal Economic Atlas

Planning in Somalia is frequently done against national figures that were never designed to describe a federation. An aggregate that holds for the country holds for none of its parts, and a ministry in Baidoa or Garowe deciding where to put a road cannot use it. Veynuus intends to produce a federal economic atlas: one volume, one template, a profile for each federal member state. The atlas has not been compiled. This page sets out what it would contain and how we would build it.

What this publication covers

The atlas is planned as a set of state profiles written to a common structure, so that a reader can take one state end to end or read a single section across every state. Each profile would cover the productive base of the state, its infrastructure and trade corridors, the revenue and expenditure picture as far as state budget documents allow, the main employers and market towns, and the constraints that state authorities themselves identify.

Around the profiles would sit a comparative section holding a defined indicator set, and a map series covering ports, roads, airstrips and corridor connections. The comparative section would carry an honest account of its own limits: state statistical capacity differs, definitions differ, and several indicators that would be useful cannot currently be assembled on a like-for-like basis. Where that is the case the atlas would say so rather than publish a comparison it cannot stand behind.

Method

Compilation would begin with documentary work in each state: state budget and planning documents, ministry records, port and customs returns where they exist, and the assessments produced by agencies and development banks operating in that state. These sources rarely agree on definitions, so the first substantive task is a harmonisation exercise: deciding what each indicator will mean across the atlas and recording where a state's own figures are measured differently.

The second layer is fieldwork. We would visit each state rather than compile it remotely, interviewing officials in state ministries of planning and finance, chambers of commerce, port and corridor operators, and business associations, using a common interview protocol. Fieldwork in several of these states requires security planning and local partnership, and the schedule would be built around what can actually be reached rather than what would be ideal to reach.

Each figure entering the atlas would carry a source, a date and a verification note in a source register published with the volume. Before publication, each draft state profile would be put back to the relevant state authority for factual correction. That step is not a clearance process and the authority would not hold a veto on interpretation, but a profile a state government believes is factually wrong is of little use to anyone, and correcting it before publication is cheaper than defending it afterwards.

Who it is for

The atlas is intended for state and federal planning ministries deciding where to invest, development partners designing state-level programmes, investors assessing a specific location rather than the country in the abstract, and researchers who currently have to reconstruct this material privately every time they need it. It is also intended for the states themselves, several of which hold the underlying records but have never had them assembled into one comparable document.

Status

The atlas is in preparation. No profiles have been completed and no comparative data has been assembled, so nothing here should be read as a description of any state's economy. We are currently establishing data access and consultation arrangements with state authorities. Institutions interested in the atlas, in supporting its production, or in contributing state-level data should write to [email protected].