Somalia Pilots Digital Public Infrastructure With Its National Job Portal
“I want the application to benefit the people it is intended for—to simplify work and add real value,” he said.
MOGADISHU, Somalia — On a warm afternoon in the capital, 23-year-old Abdirahim Ali Mohamud Shuriye refreshed a website that did not exist a year earlier: the Somali National Job Portal. The page was stark—search bar, vacancy list, live counters of job seekers and employers—but to a recent SIMAD University graduate who had spent months chasing scattered job posts on Telegram, Facebook and WhatsApp, its simplicity felt like a breakthrough.
For years, Somalis applied for work through a maze of ministry notices, radio announcements and personal networks. The new portal promised something different: a single, public entry point to a fragmented labor market. Within weeks of creating his profile, Abdirahim found a nationwide business idea competition advertised by the National Employment Service Center. He applied online, pitched to a panel drawn from the private sector, received tailored coaching—and was named one of 10 winners, awarded a $2,500 grant.
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His trajectory offers a human window into a larger shift. Somalia is attempting to replace paperwork, opaque shortlists and siloed announcements with shared digital infrastructure—an approach officials describe as Digital Public Infrastructure, or DPI—that reorders how public services are delivered and how power, data and trust move through state systems.
“I saw the Somali National Job Portal website and didn’t hesitate,” Abdirahim said. “It is a simple website with many opportunities. I had a business idea and was looking for funding while unemployed.”
The grant is helping him develop AgriSoko, a digital platform aimed at women agripreneurs and youth farmers who face limited market access, knowledge gaps, financing barriers and high post-harvest losses. AgriSoko is still under construction—the dashboard incomplete, software nearing launch—but its concept is concrete. It intends to provide:
- A knowledge base with access to agricultural experts
- An inputs marketplace connecting farmers to vetted suppliers
- Real-time market price information
- Buyer–seller linkages across regions
- Facilitation of access to finance
- Digital tools to reduce post-harvest inefficiencies
“I want the application to benefit the people it is intended for—to simplify work and add real value,” he said.
The job portal that surfaced Abdirahim’s opportunity launched on March 15, 2025, as a collaboration led by the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs (MoLSA) with technical and financial support from the International Organization for Migration (IOM). It is hosted by the National Data Agency under the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. Employers must verify their business licenses to post vacancies. Job seekers upload CVs; the service is free for both sides.
“It came from a need to connect talent with opportunity,” said Zakariye Abdi Hassan, director of the Department of Employment and Job Creation at MoLSA. “With youth unemployment high, we needed a centralized employment service.”
In practice, the portal functions as a public utility for recruitment. Instead of ministries running separate databases and accepting paper files, vacancies are aggregated in one searchable space. International organizations and private firms have followed government agencies in listing openings, and the ministry now runs regular workshops to help candidates strengthen CVs and learn the system, with tailored sessions for women and persons with disabilities.
As of Feb. 12, 2026, the portal listed 1,976 registered job seekers, with two vacancies live and 15 employers active—figures posted on the homepage. The numbers are a reminder of structural realities: centralization does not create jobs; it organizes access to them. In a labor market where most economic activity remains informal, the portal can surface opportunities and standardize process, but it cannot manufacture vacancies on its own.
Still, the platform encodes new rules. “Only the job seeker’s CV is used to search for a job. No other sensitive information is collected,” Hassan said, noting that servers are hosted domestically and that data protection is guided by national regulations. License verification for employers is designed to deter fraud, and the centralized database makes audits and oversight easier, at least in principle.
That design logic—public, interoperable systems built once and used widely—is what supporters mean by Digital Public Infrastructure. Rather than spinning up bespoke sites for each ministry, Somalia is experimenting with shared building blocks for digital identity, data hosting and service delivery. In countries with mature bureaucracies, such infrastructure fades into the background. Here, where institutions are still consolidating trust, the architecture remains visible—and contested—as it shapes who participates and how decisions are recorded.
The job portal emerged from a web of public–private consultation, including the Federation of Somali Employers and Trade Unions, the Chamber of Commerce and the National Technical Advisory Committee on Labor Migration. A specialized implementation committee of IT experts from MoLSA and IOM oversaw system development and deployment, aligning it with labor market needs and the National Development Plan’s priorities of job creation, economic recovery and social stability. The effort also forms part of the Better Regional Migration Management programme, funded by the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office.
It has since evolved beyond vacancy listings. In December 2025, the National Employment Service Center concluded a three-month training program for more than 200 young people, offering weekly cohorts instruction in communication, CV writing and interview preparation. The ministry says more than 1,000 youth have been empowered through business skills development programs. Officials have pledged plans to create job opportunities for more than 40,000 young people in the coming months, part of wider efforts to reduce unemployment and poverty.
Promises will be tested by capacity and the wider economy, but even incremental shifts in process matter. In the old system, applicants juggled photocopies, in-person submissions and rumors of closing dates. Shortlists, if they existed, were rarely published. Decisions were opaque. Informal networks—clan ties, personal referrals, diaspora connections—often stood in for institutional clarity.
The portal does not erase those dynamics, but it redistributes some informational power. A public listing is a public record. A standardized submission is easier to track. A shared database makes it harder to hide process, even if it cannot yet guarantee fairness at every step.
That is also where risks accumulate. As more services move online, the stakes of cybersecurity rise. A centralized database concentrates value—and vulnerability. Officials insist on safeguards and domestic hosting; Somalia’s data protection regime is still evolving. The question is less whether to digitize than how to harden systems while expanding access, especially for candidates without reliable internet or digital literacy.
For job seekers like Abdirahim, the calculus is immediate. A plain portal page led to an open call, a transparent application, outside judges and a grant that nudged a promising idea closer to reality. “I was told that the money I received was not a loan but a grant,” he said. “I was happy that I found that opportunity through the Somali National Job Portal.”
His AgriSoko prototype will live or die on its utility to farmers. The portal that surfaced it will be judged on a broader promise: whether a country rebuilding its institutions can use shared digital rails to make opportunity less arbitrary and more visible. For now, a single website has narrowed the distance between rumor and result, and that is no small change.
By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
