HARGEISA, Somaliland — In a move that officials described as part policy reset and part practical necessity, Somaliland’s finance ministry on Wednesday hosted senior United Nations and UNICEF officials for talks aimed at accelerating humanitarian and development programs across the country.
Abdillahi Hassan Adan, Somaliland’s minister of finance and economic development, met with Dr. Tedla M. Damte, the head of the U.N. office and UNICEF’s field director for Somaliland, to discuss stepped-up coordination on projects spanning child protection, health, education, and nutrition. Mohamed Hassan Suleiman, director general of the finance ministry, also attended the meeting at the ministry’s headquarters in Hargeisa. The two sides said they agreed on a program of follow-up technical meetings to align budgets, monitoring, and implementation timelines.
“Partnership means ownership,” Adan told reporters after the meeting. “Somaliland must drive its own development, with the U.N. standing as a key partner in that journey.” Dr. Damte framed the outreach more narrowly but no less urgently: “Our focus is ensuring that UNICEF and other U.N. agencies align their programs with the government’s priorities so that no child is left behind.”
The discussion highlighted an enduring paradox of Somaliland’s international position. The territory has run its own institutions since 1991, held relatively regular elections, and built bureaucratic capacity in Hargeisa — yet it remains unrecognized as an independent state by the United Nations and most governments. That lack of diplomatic recognition constrains Somaliland’s direct access to bilateral and multilateral financing and forces many donors to work through U.N. agencies and international NGOs, officials and analysts say.
Practical priorities: children, nutrition, health
UNICEF and other agencies have been among the few international actors to maintain a sustained presence in Somaliland, responding to chronic and seasonal needs. According to UNICEF planning documents, the agency’s 2025 humanitarian appeal for Somalia — which includes programs for Somaliland under the Somalia country program — targets more than a million children and seeks funding for nutrition, primary health care, water, sanitation, and education interventions. The agency reports that hundreds of thousands of children are at risk of acute malnutrition and that emergency nutrition programs remain a top priority.
Those needs give the current talks a sense of urgency. Somaliland’s youth bulge — UNICEF and partner reports note that a large share of the population is under 18 — means that investments in schooling, immunization and nutrition programs have outsized long-term consequences. “The numbers speak for themselves: investing now in children’s health and schooling reduces future vulnerability and increases economic resilience,” a senior UNICEF official said in Hargeisa.
A pragmatic relationship, not a diplomatic breakthrough
For all the talk of partnership, both Somaliland and U.N. officials were careful to frame the meeting in developmental terms rather than as a political landmark. U.N. agencies typically avoid actions that could be read as implying recognition of a state. Still, the meeting illustrates a widening set of working relationships between Hargeisa and international institutions that treat Somaliland as a distinct governance and humanitarian environment, even if formal recognition remains elusive. “We are expanding cooperation on the ground — not settling questions of sovereignty,” a U.N. diplomat who follows the Horn of Africa told the SaxafiMedia.
That practical approach has precedents. Over the past decade, international investors and multilateral actors have engaged selectively with Somaliland — most visibly around the port of Berbera, where DP World and other partners have invested in capacity that could make the port a regional logistics hub. Such engagements have strengthened Somaliland’s economic case for greater international integration, even as the political debate over recognition continues.
Money, systems, and local ownership
Somaliland officials have emphasized the need to move beyond short-term projects toward systems strengthening: better public financial management, more robust procurement and monitoring systems, and clearer lines of accountability for donor money. “We want to see programs that are embedded in our budget cycle and that leave behind stronger institutions,” said Mohamed Hassan Suleiman, the finance ministry director general. Those remarks echoed a broader push by Hargeisa to shift from being a passive recipient to an active co-designer of aid interventions.
Donors and U.N. agencies, for their part, have been under pressure to demonstrate results amid a crowded humanitarian field in the Horn of Africa. The 2024–25 droughts and recurrent flooding across the Somali peninsula have stretched response capacities and prompted calls for better coordination to avoid duplicative programs and to ensure that scarce funds reach the most vulnerable. UNICEF’s country planning documents underscore the balancing act: maintaining emergency relief while expanding routine services such as immunization and school feeding.
Voices from civil society and the private sector
Local civil society leaders welcomed the meeting but also urged skepticism: long meetings do not always translate into durable improvements in basic services. “We have seen projects come and go,” said Amina Yusuf, director of a Hargeisa-based child-rights NGO. “What matters is sustained financing matched with local capacity building and community engagement.”
Others in the business community emphasized the economic spillovers of better health and education: healthier, better-educated workers are the precondition for attracting more private investment and leveraging strategic assets like Berbera.
Regional analysts say Somaliland’s strategy is increasingly to combine development partnerships with selective engagement from foreign governments sympathetic to stability in the Gulf of Aden — a dynamic that gives Hargeisa leverage even as recognition remains off the table. U.S. congressional interest in opening representative offices and recent diplomatic moves around Ethiopian port access have underlined how geopolitical calculations intersect with development priorities in the region.
What comes next
Officials said the Hargeisa meeting would be followed by technical working groups that will map funding requests to Somaliland’s budget cycle and set concrete targets for health, nutrition, and education interventions in the coming year. U.N. officials stressed that success will depend on predictable funding from donors — a perennial constraint — and on Hargeisa’s willingness to adopt internationally accepted procurement and transparency standards.
For now, the interaction between the Somaliland finance ministry and UNICEF signals both the deepening of a pragmatic relationship and the limits of what such ties can achieve absent broader diplomatic shifts. “This is about delivering services to children today,” Dr. Damte said. “Recognition is a political conversation for others. Our job is to save lives and build systems that last.”
