Livelihoods & Economic Recovery

More than 60 percent of Somalia’s population is under the age of 25, and youth unemployment runs at roughly a third among the highest rates in the region, according to World Bank estimates. With few formal jobs available, most working-age Somalis are self-employed or dependent on family support just to get by. For a young person or a farming household, one skill, one small loan, or one restocked herd can be the difference between chronic dependency and a sustainable livelihood and a household earning its own income is one that can keep its children in school and cover its own medical care. Our livelihoods programs help people build businesses, learn trades, and strengthen the farms and herds they depend on.

Years of drought, conflict, and displacement have eroded the pastoralism and small-scale farming that most Somali households depend on, while urban and displaced populations face few formal jobs and almost no access to credit. Humanitarian aid alone doesn’t fix that — it meets the immediate need and leaves the underlying vulnerability in place.

We pair skills-building — vocational training, entrepreneurship support — with direct restoration of productive assets: seeds, tools, livestock, veterinary care. A trained person with no capital and a funded asset with no skills tend to fail for the same reason, so we fund both together. We also work through savings groups and market linkages, so support is the start of a durable income rather than a one-off transfer — the resilience-building model that distinguishes recovery programming from short-term relief.