A Leader's Note: Talent Is the Strategy
Strategy in the Horn of Africa is rarely limited by ideas. It is limited by how many people an organisation has who can carry an idea through to delivery without supervision.
Every organisation I have worked with in this region has had more strategy than it could execute. The plans are usually sound. What is scarce is the layer of people who can take a plan, understand what it is for, and make the hundred small judgements required to deliver it without checking upwards each time. That layer, and not the plan, is what sets the ceiling. Where it is thin, a good strategy produces the same result as a mediocre one, which is a series of activities that never quite compound.
The ceiling is set by the second row
Leaders in this market are often visible and capable, and organisations built around them are fragile in a specific way. Decisions concentrate at the top because that is where judgement is trusted, and because it is faster in the short run. The cost arrives later, when the organisation tries to do two things at once and finds it can only do the one the principal is attending to. Depth in the second row is what allows parallel work, and building it is slower and less satisfying than deciding oneself.
Depth in the second row is what allows an organisation to run parallel work. It is built by delegating live work, not by training around it.
What hiring here actually involves
Recruiting in Mogadishu is not the same exercise as recruiting in a market with deep professional labour supply, and pretending otherwise produces job descriptions written for people who do not exist. A specification asking for ten years of sector experience, a postgraduate qualification and fluency in three languages will return few applicants, and the organisation will conclude there is no talent. What there is, in quantity, is capable people whose experience does not match the shape of the description: graduates from local universities with no exposure to formal professional practice, returning diaspora professionals with strong technical training and little context, and people who have run substantial operations informally without ever holding a title that a recruiter recognises.
The three groups fail in different ways and succeed in different ways. Diaspora hires bring method and frequently underestimate how much of their method depends on institutions that are not present here. Local graduates bring context and need to be taught professional practice explicitly, because nobody has shown it to them. People with informal operating experience often have the best judgement in the room and no vocabulary for it. Each requires a different investment, and treating them as one pool is why so many hires here are described afterwards as not working out.
Retention when you cannot win on salary
Any organisation in Somalia that trains people well will lose some of them to international agencies that pay more. That is a condition to plan around rather than a problem to solve. The organisations that hold their people are not usually the ones paying most; they are the ones giving work that visibly develops someone, responsibility earlier than is comfortable, and a manager who explains reasoning rather than issuing instructions. People leave for money when there is nothing else on the other side of the ledger.
It also helps to be honest that some departures are successes. A person who leaves after four years to run a unit in a ministry takes the standards they learned with them, and the sector is better for it. An organisation that treats every exit as a loss will under-invest in the people most worth investing in.
Women, and the depth nobody is using
The most underused capacity in this market is female professional talent, and the reasons it goes unused are practical rather than attitudinal in most organisations. Roles are designed around travel and hours that assume no caring responsibility. Recruitment runs through networks that were formed in male-dominated rooms. Promotion depends on visibility in settings women are invited to less often. Each of those is a design decision, and each can be changed by whoever is designing. An organisation that fixes them recruits from a pool its competitors have effectively excluded themselves from.
Where this leaves strategy
The practical conclusion is that talent planning belongs in the strategy document rather than in an annex to it. Before committing to a direction, ask who will hold it, whether that person is already in the organisation, and if not, how long it takes to develop or find them. A strategy that has answered those questions is a plan.