Before Veynuus, There Was Hodmas

I did not plan to open a university. That is probably the most honest way to begin this story. What happened was slower and more accidental than any plan, it was a life that kept pulling me toward education until I stopped resisting and said yes.

I was studying for my MBA in Communication and Public Relations in Malaysia when I found myself working at Limkokwing University of Creative Technology. At the time, Limkokwing was one of the most internationally recognised universities in the region. They held campuses in Botswana, Eswatini, Sierra Leone and were exploring Uganda. They had become a genuine model of what borderless education could look like in practice, and working closely with Tan Sri Limkokwing himself gave me a view of higher education I had never had before. It was ambitious and human at the same time. I left carrying something I had not expected to leave with: a quiet obsession.

After Limkokwing I worked briefly at MAHSA University and later at Cyberjaya University College. Each role taught me something new about how institutions are built and how students are shaped by them. But there was also something underneath all of it that was more personal. I grew up in a family where education was simply what you believed in. My father established Ablaal Primary and Secondary School in 1988, and today its graduates are bankers, journalists, business people and community figures. I grew up watching what a school can do to a community over decades. It does something to you. You stop thinking about education as a sector and start thinking about it as a responsibility.

In early 2020 I travelled to Türkiye to attend AFMED training for media professionals. I toured TRT World and Anadolu Agency, met people working at the intersection of media and public life, and felt a real excitement about the communications field I had been studying. Then the pandemic arrived and closed everything. I was stranded in Türkiye with a lot of time and nowhere to go. And somewhere in that stillness, the decision formed. When I finally came home to Somalia, I came back with a plan to open a university.

Hodmas University College launched with a curriculum that was intentionally different from anything available in the country at the time. We offered cybersecurity, multimedia, business entrepreneurship, fields the rest of the world had already recognised as essential but that Somali students and families were not yet familiar with. Most people arriving at our doors were expecting the courses they already knew: banking and finance, civil engineering, IT, medicine, nursing. Convincing them to trust something unfamiliar required more than good marketing. It required patience and genuine conversation. It was harder than I had expected, and I had not expected it to be easy.

We started with around $50,000 and a belief that the right students would find us. To keep the institution running while our main programmes grew, we offered short courses, diplomas and professional training in partnership with organisations that needed capacity building. We built additional commercial spaces on the campus to bring in supplementary income. We hired staff from Somalia, Kenya and Uganda. For a time, it worked well enough to continue.

But beyond keeping the lights on, I wanted Hodmas to stand for something more than its courses. Two initiatives in particular felt close to my heart, because they were about what students actually needed to succeed, not just what the curriculum said they should learn.

These were not grand programmes with large budgets. They were built on relationships, belief and the conviction that students in Somalia deserved the same quality of exposure and connection as students anywhere else in the world.

The difficulties, though, were not only financial. Being a young woman in my twenties trying to raise investment in Mogadishu meant running into walls that had nothing to do with the quality of what we were building. Security personnel showed up on campus and intimidated students without cause or justification. The government required tax payments from institutions not yet generating any profit. When the landlord raised the rent, the numbers that had barely been holding stopped holding entirely.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this I attended the Times Higher Education summit in Ghana, hosted by Ashesi University. It brought together universities and education experts from across Africa, and it was one of the most clarifying experiences of the whole venture. The conversations there made visible what I had been trying not to see for months: that building a sustainable institution in Somalia required not just passion but strong governance, stable financing, regulatory support and a public that understood what you were offering. I was managing all of those gaps at once, and I was doing it as someone who was still learning in real time.

The moment I understood I needed to think about an exit, I made one promise to myself: I would not leave until every student who had chosen us was safe. Eleven students had stayed with Hodmas for two years. I worked through their documentation one by one, personally, following up until each of them had been accepted somewhere else. Some of those students have since graduated. Getting to know that still means something to me.

A phone call from a colleague asking if I was open to selling the university came at exactly the right moment. We sold for a fraction of what had been invested but it was not nothing, and it meant Hodmas would continue under new leadership rather than simply close. I left on good terms with the staff who had given so much, with the students who had trusted us, and even with the landlord who eventually needed his space back. I count that as grace. You do not always get to leave with grace.

Shortly after I left, the government introduced new regulations that extended degree durations across the board. It added years to already long programmes in a country where formal employment is already scarce and students are already questioning whether graduation leads anywhere. It would have been very difficult to absorb that change on top of everything else we were carrying. I tell myself I left before I lost everything, including my love for what we had tried to do.

Somali higher education needs something more honest than what it currently receives from those responsible for it. There are too many institutions operating purely for commercial return. What is needed is genuine curriculum reform, better coordination between degrees and real market needs, quality controls that mean something, and mandatory practical training that gives every graduate at least one skill they can use independently if formal employment does not come. The Ministry has a role to play that it has not yet fully stepped into.

Hodmas was painful. It was also, in ways I could not have understood while I was inside it, exactly what I needed to go through. The years I spent building something from nothing, managing people, thinking through institutional design, running initiatives born out of real need, navigating investment and learning how to exit with care, all of it became the foundation I brought to Veynuus.

Being young, female and deeply passionate in an environment that was not yet ready for what I was building did not protect me from the hard lessons. But it did prepare me for what came next. And what came next is this work, this firm, and everything still ahead.