1.     Enrollment in education or vocational sectors needed in the country such as agriculture, veterinary studies, livestock-farming or natural resource management are less than expected by decision makers. This gap in the number of students enrolled in these essential sectors which have great opportunities in the job market was enough for private sector companies or event small business to seek the assistance from foreign labor.   2.     Quality of basic education is measured in terms of performance on tests and examinations which shows a decline through time from 2015 of 97% to 75% in 2020. Performance also declines from primary education to secondary education as well. The metric itself to assess success was one of the things all our participants agreed was not a proper measurement gauge educational performance.    3.     Another major issue facing education is that schools (private or even public) each have their own curriculum. There is no standardized curriculum in schools or training centers. In addition to post civil war there is almost limited number of public schools funded by government entities.    4.     The innovation ecosystem in Somalia is mainly working on providing training opportunities or capacity building exercises, an effort suffering from high duplication. The hubs are working in isolation form each other and have no connection to the labor market or educational system (an observation from field visits). This disconnect from the educational system an this system being an ailing one is what forces these hubs to fill in some of the gaps such as illiteracy to which prompted them to start additional literacy courses (case with the UNFPA youth centres).  5.     In terms of needs there is a huge need for vocational skills (TVET skills) , however, one of the major reasons students don’t enroll is related to a social stigma within society towards these types of skills.   There are more insights which we mapped out in this following miro board:  https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVPzYDrq4=/?share_link_id=482314305898

The issue of managing expectations from our government partners and collaborators was a huge barrier.  

In early 2022, we did an ecosystem map of actors in education within Somalia. This was to understand the relationships and dependencies between various actors and how they link up together. Which helped us to point out key institutes, locations, and individuals to do in depth interviews. These interviews paved the way to understand the issue of quality of education and the gap between education and needs of the job market. Then we went on field visits to some of the innovation centers, youth centers and educational institutions. 

With a better understanding of the problem, we realized that we needed to find solutions but not in the traditional way. Thus, the use of collective intelligence with a group of stakeholders to give us entry points towards solving the question of improving education. And we supported the ministry of youth to conduct the international youth day celebration with the theme of improving education and what needs to be done to achieve this.  Another approach was to use foresight to envision the future and what skills  (future of work) would be needed to fill the job/skill gaps. Thus we conducted a foresight workshop along with our government counterpart to this end. 

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We worked with the university of Hargeisa's faculty and dean in the data gathering stage of the challenge. 

At this stage we didn't work with private sector partners except at the stage of detailed interviews (data collection). 

We collaborated with the ministry of Youth in Hargeisa to conduct a foresight workshop, in addition to collaborating and helping them host an event with the theme of improving the educational system and solutions for the problem. 

The ministry of Youth in Hargeisa. 

 We worked and are still working with UNFPA in a partnership to improve and utilize several youth centres in different cities. In terms of this challenge we used these centres as entry points to communities and youth in particular for experimenting with TVET and STEAM training.