Somaliland is one the poorest countries in the world, and its capital, Hargeisa, was subjected to devastating bombing by a socialist dictator before it declared independence. Many of its people are desert nomads with no school nearby. Socialist “dictator Siad Barre massacred an estimated 200,000 members of the Isaaq tribe, the largest clan group in” Somaliland. “At the time, some Isaaqs were fighting for independence, and to eliminate the threat, Barre tried to exterminate all of them. Experts now say there are more than 200 mass graves in Somaliland, most of them in the Valley of Death.”
But people there are learning to read by themselves, thanks to a new app. Hodan Artan
works as a cleaner in Somaliland’s capital, Hargeisa. With the little money she earns, a mud hut with a cloth roof flapping in the wind is all the 23-year-old single mother can afford for herself and her baby daughter.
Until recently, she did not think she could aspire to anything more.
“When I was a child, I couldn’t afford to go to school, neither could my parents,” she says.
Ms Artan was never taught to read or write.
Then, a few months ago, she found out about an app called Daariz, which, according to their user data, has now taught over 410,000 people across the Horn of Africa to do just that.
Encouraged by her friends, she started studying on her phone in her spare time and – in just over two months – has made remarkable progress: the young mother is now able to read and fully comprehend some short stories in Somali.
Her case is far from unique in Somaliland, a place that has long struggled with illiteracy.
The region declared independence in 1991 in the course of a civil war. It is not internationally recognised as a separate state, but it has a democratically elected government and has enjoyed greater stability than the rest of Somalia.
The legacy of the war, the lack of infrastructure and a recurring drought have made it one of the regions with the lowest literacy rates in the world.
According to data from 2022 from the UN children’s agency, Unicef, around three in every four adults cannot read and write and one child in four is not in school….
“A lot of the population are pastoralists and rural. They are isolated. Some of them are on the move,” says Peter Quamo, education chief at Unicef Somalia….
The issue of how to reach those kids has been the focus of many education projects in the region, launched both by the local authorities and international NGOs.
But Ismail Ahmed and his charity, the Sahamiye Foundation, believe they have found the perfect formula to work around it.. using “mobile phones to tackle the learning crisis” in his country of origin.
Daariz was his brainchild. The app is free and can work offline, enabling people in remote areas and on the move to use it….
About 10km (six miles) outside Hargeisa, Mubaarik Mahdi is taking his camels out to pasture.
When he was a child, he could only go to school for two years and he does not remember much.
Doing business had become difficult for him. With most people nowadays using mobile payment apps like Zaad, Mr Mahdi was struggling even to read his customers’ names on payment slips, he says.
So now, as his camels are scattered in the field, feeding on thick green bushes, Mr Mahdi sits in the shade of a tree and mumbles slowly the words on his screen.
He says thanks to learning on his phone, he has become more confident dealing with his customers on his mobile and has even started buying books.
The stability and growing literacy in Somaliland are impressive because it was devastated by the genocidal socialist dictator of Somalia in the so-called “Hargeisa Holocaust” before it broke away from Somalia to become its own country, which is not internationally recognized. Neighboring Somalia, which is to the south of Somaliland and has more than three times as many people,
has been in a state of civil turmoil for much of the past 35 years, trapped in a conflict whose opening phase saw the destruction of 90% of Hargeisa amid an aerial bombardment by the collapsing government of the military dictator Siad Barre. Barre and his son-in-law oversaw the alleged genocide of civilians from the Isaaq clan, an event also known as the “Hargeisa Holocaust,” between 1987-1989.
