By 5 Magazine…..
When Somalia adopted its Provisional Constitution in 2012 and welcomed its first permanent central government in over two decades, the country began the demanding work of rebuilding its public institutions. Ministries were re-establishing their offices, staff and mandates, while the systems needed to count citizens, mobilise revenue and track whether public services were reaching people were still being developed. State building in Somalia has never been a single event; it has been, and remains, a patient, Somali-led process of building the systems that allow a government to know its people, manage its resources and account for its decisions.
Horn Africa Consultants Firm (HACOF) was founded in that same year and has spent the years since supporting that process. Today, HACOF is an international development firm operating across Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Djibouti, Sudan and Mozambique, with more than 400 projects delivered and a network of over 1,000 personnel, consultants and researchers. Its most significant body of work, however, has been carried out in partnership with Somalia’s own institutions, alongside United Nations agencies, multilateral organisations and international development partners.
HACOF’s role has been that of a facilitator and technical partner. It does not finance programmes; instead, it contributes through three interconnected areas: generating reliable evidence, transferring knowledge, and building the capacity of Somali people and institutions. This is the quieter, less visible side of state building: not the peace agreements and elections that make headlines, but the everyday systems of governance, such as public financial management, civil registration, revenue administration and the data that helps turn evidence into policy. It is in this space that HACOF has built its closest partnerships with the Federal Government of Somalia and the Federal Member States, acting as a bridge that brings reliable, independently collected data to government and development partners alike.
A Somali-Led Response to a National Data Gap
When Mohamed Hassan, HACOF’s founder and Chief Executive Officer, talks about the year he started the firm, he does not begin with a business plan. He begins with a famine.
“A year before we started, there was a huge famine in Somalia,” he recalls. “It left a humanitarian catastrophe, and the reach of native humanitarian actors was minimal and disjointed.”
At the time, the country’s institutions were at an early stage of recovery and much of southern Somalia faced serious insecurity. Decision-makers in government and among humanitarian and development partners alike lacked reliable data on where needs were greatest, who required assistance and whether the response was working. Hassan, then working with the UN, saw that gap first-hand.
“There was a gap for decision-making due to lack of reliable data across the whole nation,” he says. “So we decided, why don’t we initiate a platform, an entity, by Somali natives, to fill that data gap?”
That question became HACOF’s founding premise: that a Somali-led organisation could supply reliable evidence to government and its partners while helping strengthen the institutions that would act on it.
In a post-conflict environment, however, collecting reliable primary data is not simply a matter of conducting surveys. It requires the ability to access communities, operate in difficult and sometimes insecure settings, reach geographically dispersed populations, understand local contexts and cultures, and maintain strong data-quality systems. Even so, decision-makers needed timely information to design programmes, target resources and assess results.
In those early years, government institutions were rebuilding with great commitment under challenging conditions: limited office space and equipment, a still-growing pool of trained personnel, and systems being established even as demand for services rose. Continuity was a shared challenge, as experienced staff moved on in response to insecurity, new opportunities or growing workloads.
HACOF’s early role, as Hassan describes it, was therefore as much about staying the course and embedding technical support long enough for institutional knowledge to take root as it was about delivering data and research. By combining technical expertise with local knowledge, field networks, digital data-collection systems and trained personnel, HACOF steadily became a trusted evidence partner to Somali institutions, UN agencies and international development organisations.
Hassan is also quick to credit the partnerships that supported this early work. Programmes such as USAID’s stabilisation initiatives, he says, helped Somali authorities re-establish some of their first local government offices and created spaces for women and youth to take part in civic life. Just as important were the Somali civil servants, local leaders and communities who kept these institutions running through difficult years.
Strengthening Local Governance and Public Finance
Somalia’s state-building agenda has long rested on a simple but demanding premise: legitimacy is built locally before it can be claimed nationally. Citizens experience the state not through a parliamentary session, but through a district council that responds to their needs.
Under the USAID Transitional Initiative for Stabilization and People-Centered Governance (PCG) Program, one of the firm’s largest engagements to date, HACOF helped facilitate inclusive processes for the formation of district councils, working alongside local authorities and communities to support local resource management, accountability mechanisms and citizen engagement structures. District-level institution building, led by councils and communities themselves, is not peripheral to state building; it is its foundation.
The same conviction, that a state is only as strong as the systems that make it accountable, shaped HACOF’s public financial management (PFM) work with the World Bank. HACOF conducted a district-level PFM assessment across Somalia, establishing a baseline of local governance and fiscal capacity, identifying priority areas for improvement and proposing reforms to strengthen accountability.
By generating a systematic district-level picture of PFM capacity, HACOF provided government and development partners with a shared evidence base to guide where reform investment should go.
Facilitating National Priorities in Identity and Revenue
One of HACOF’s most significant current partnerships is with the National Identification and Registration Authority (NIRA), which leads Somalia’s National ID programme. Since the start of 2025, HACOF has supported NIRA by managing the recruitment, training and nationwide deployment of registration staff for the first phase of the rollout, and by monitoring staff performance and reporting to NIRA to support accountability.
A national identity system helps a government deliver social protection, mobilise revenue fairly and prepare for credible elections. Under NIRA’s leadership, Somalia is now building that system for its citizens. HACOF’s contribution is a practical example of its role as a facilitator of national priorities, and one the firm is proud to play.
Working with the Ministry of Finance, HACOF also conducted a nationwide Taxpayer Perception Survey examining satisfaction, trust and compliance within Somalia’s tax system. Alongside the government’s customs unification and wider revenue reforms, domestic revenue mobilisation is widely seen as a key measure of self-reliance: the more a government funds its own services, the more directly it answers to its citizens.
By showing where taxpayer trust is strong, where it can be improved and what makes compliance easier, HACOF’s findings give the Ministry evidence to inform its efforts to widen Somalia’s own revenue base.
Generating Evidence for National Policy
Good governance depends on good data. A second thread running through HACOF’s work has been helping build the evidence base on which policy decisions, from national budgets to trade strategy, rest. The clearest expression of this is HACOF’s long relationship with the Somali National Bureau of Statistics (SNBS), which has led a determined national effort to rebuild Somalia’s statistical system.
HACOF evaluated how effectively SNBS serves the ministries, researchers and citizens who depend on its data, and helped build a framework for ongoing user feedback, supporting the Bureau’s own commitment to continuously improving its products. HACOF also supported SNBS on the World Bank-funded Somali Integrated Household Budget Survey.
As a Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC), Somalia needed credible, up-to-date data on household income, consumption and poverty to move forward on debt relief, and the survey was an important step for the Federal Government in that process. Led by SNBS, the survey gave the government the evidence it needed to advance debt relief, strengthened national capacity for household data collection and informed poverty-reduction planning. For HACOF, it demonstrated the firm’s capacity to support national statistical institutions in generating socioeconomic information at scale.
HACOF has also worked with UN agencies, including FAO, on assignments covering agriculture and fisheries, contributing primary evidence in sectors directly linked to livelihoods, food security and economic development.
With the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, HACOF is currently supporting the development of Somalia’s National Trade Policy 2027–2031 through stakeholder consultations, bilingual English–Somali documentation and official policy statements that will shape how Somalia deepens its participation in regional and global trade.
That partnership extended to a Simplified Trade Regime Study at the Somali–Kenyan border, where HACOF analysed informal cross-border trade and produced a practical framework and communication guide to inform trade facilitation policy. In the livestock sector, the backbone of Somalia’s export economy, HACOF’s value chain study of camels, cattle, goats and sheep examined production, marketing and governance challenges, generating recommendations that support national efforts to modernise and formalise Somalia’s largest source of foreign exchange.
Transferring Knowledge and Building Somalia’s Human Capital
HACOF’s contribution extends beyond collecting data and delivering reports. By working alongside government ministries, agencies and other national institutions, HACOF staff have supported training, mentoring, technical assistance and practical learning, helping strengthen the capacity of institutions to manage and use evidence for decision-making.
Equally important has been the creation of employment and professional development opportunities for Somali people, particularly young graduates. Over the years, HACOF has recruited and trained many young Somali women and men for short- and long-term assignments as enumerators, field supervisors, data managers, analysts, researchers and monitoring and evaluation specialists, equipping them with practical skills in data science, digital data systems, ethical research practice and quality assurance.
The same principles underpin HACOF’s data: collected to recognised ethical standards, carefully quality-checked and shared transparently, so that government, development partners and communities can rely on it.
Over time, these assignments have created a growing national pool of technical and research capacity. Professionals who gain experience through HACOF carry those skills into future roles across government, development organisations, research institutions and the private sector. In this way, HACOF has contributed not only to generating information about Somalia’s people, but also to developing the people and skills needed to support Somalia’s future.
Looking Ahead as a Long-Term Knowledge Partner
State building requires more than policies, institutions and financial resources; it also requires credible information on which decisions can be based. The relationship is simple: credible data generates evidence; evidence supports informed decisions; informed decisions lead to better-designed programmes; and better-designed programmes contribute to improved services and development outcomes. HACOF’s contribution sits within this ecosystem of evidence, knowledge and capacity.
Since 2012, Somalia’s institutional story has been one of steady reconstruction: a ministry strengthened here, a data system restored there, a district council building closer ties with its community. As Somalia advances its National Transformation Plan, expands its National ID system and deepens its public financial management reforms, HACOF sees its role not as an external contractor completing deliverables, but as a long-term facilitator and knowledge partner: bringing reliable data to government and development partners, building the skills of young Somali professionals, and supporting national institutions as they lead the country’s own development.
HACOF’s work now extends well beyond Somalia’s borders. Its reach runs from Mogadishu to Maputo and from Nairobi to Juba and Port Sudan, carrying an approach shaped by its Somali experience to other countries in the region.
Asked what keeps HACOF invested after more than a decade, Hassan speaks of passion: building a pioneering Somali organisation from the ground up to serve local communities and support nations as they chart their own future. What began as a response to a data gap during a famine has grown into a lasting story of evidence, knowledge and people, and a contribution to a state-building journey that belongs, first and foremost, to Somalia’s own institutions and people.
