Opinion/Analysis: Somalia’s livestock trade thrives without aid — and exposes the architecture of development failure
By every conventional measure, Somalia should not have a functioning agricultural export sector. The country lacks effective development bank programs, European Union trade preferences and World Bank value chain projects. It has no subsidized inputs, no donor-funded extension services and no sprawling logframe tying every activity to a dozen indicators.
- Advertisement -
And yet its livestock trade moves more than 5 million head of cattle, goats, sheep and camels each year to Gulf markets, generating an estimated $400 million to $500 million annually. Herders are paid within days. Exporters compete on quality and timely delivery. The system survives shocks because there is no project to end — only a market to serve.
This is not an anomaly. It is an indictment of the dominant model of development finance in African agriculture.
The architecture of failure
Across Africa, international financial institutions and bilateral donors have poured billions into agro-industrial parks, special economic zones and export corridors. Too often the trace they leave behind is depressingly familiar: empty sheds, stalled roads, displaced communities and farmers who remain price-takers in value chains ostensibly built for them.
The playbook rarely changes. A government secures a loan or grant. A foreign consortium lands the contract. Land is acquired under “public purpose” provisions. Smallholders are promised jobs and contracts. The jobs are casual and low-wage; contracts are thin or ignored. Communities watch resources drain away and remember what they once owned. This is not failed development by accident. It is development as designed — a pipeline that moves resources from rural producers to political and corporate elites, scrubbed by the language of poverty reduction.
The Somali exception
Consider a system that has received almost none of this attention. In the Horn of Africa, Somali livestock exporters run one of the most functional agricultural trade networks on the continent. There are no restrictive export licenses to be captured. No state marketing boards fixing prices below costs. No capricious export bans that leave perishable cargo to rot on the quay.
Instead, there is discipline where it matters. A buyer in Saudi Arabia will reject any animal that fails health checks. An exporter in Bossaso knows her track record is her collateral. A herder in the Ogaden vaccinates camels because the pharmacy down the road stocks effective vaccines customers will buy again. A member of the Somali diaspora moves $100,000 via hawala in hours because kinship and reputation anchor repayment after Eid.
No donor designed this system; no results framework measures it. It persists because it is economically necessary and owned by the people who use it.
What development finance refuses to learn
Confronted with Somalia, the development establishment sees absence — no formal credit, no heavy regulation, no preferential access — and prescribes more intervention: more programs, more partnerships, more projects. That is exactly backward. Somalia’s experience shows farmers and traders do not need saving. They need to be unblocked.
- States that enable rather than control: competent, reliable animal-health certification — and otherwise a light regulatory touch.
- Open entry and credible buyers: export markets where inspection, not political access, determines who trades.
- Functional input markets: vaccines and feed supplied by firms that must earn repeat business, not undercut by giveaways.
- Diaspora-integrated finance: patient, trust-based capital flowing along kinship networks when commercial banks refuse to lend.
- Competition over preferences: tariff parity that pushes exporters to invest in quality rather than lobby for exemptions.
Most of this does not require a multilateral program. Much of it is actively undermined by one.
Why absence can be a strength
Somalia’s livestock sector works better than many aid-dependent agricultural programs not despite the lack of international support, but because of it. With no multilateral agribusiness loan, there were no land grabs for corridors that dispossess pastoralists. Without bilateral trade preferences, exporters avoided dependency on standards that lurch with each new regulation. Without a donor-run value chain project, local input markets were not distorted by free fertilizer or subsidized veterinary drugs that bankrupt legitimate pharmacies.
What Somalia did receive mattered — and it was limited and demand-driven: Gulf import protocols that set clear rules of access, quarantine facilities at Berbera and Bossaso that met those rules, and targeted technical assistance tied to specific bottlenecks. Not a sweeping “transformation program.” And that restraint is precisely why the system endures.
The stakes across Africa
Even now, financial institutions and donors are funding agro-industrial parks, corridors and special zones across the continent, backed by promises of jobs, value addition and private sector development. The record suggests how this story ends: fewer and more precarious jobs than pledged; communities displaced and not hired; concessions granted to foreign agribusinesses that repatriate profits and transfer little skill; completion reports that cite “implementation challenges” and recommend “enhanced stakeholder engagement” next time.
Meanwhile, the Somali livestock trader, who has never received a dollar of development finance, will continue moving millions of animals to market — feeding families, employing neighbors and building wealth that stays closer to home.
A different kind of development
Taking Somalia seriously does not mean drafting a $200 million “Livestock Export Transformation Project” with 47 indicators. That would almost certainly break what it aims to replicate. It means admitting what works, asking uncomfortable questions about what does not and directing resources accordingly.
- Admit that one of Africa’s most functional agricultural export systems operates with almost no development finance.
- Ask why the development toolkit struggles to support enterprises that are locally owned, profitable and sustainable.
- Redirect funds from megaprojects that dispossess communities to patient capital for cooperatives, diaspora-linked finance and market infrastructure that serves local traders rather than replaces them.
- Measure success not by dollars disbursed, but by whether communities retain control of land, water and value chains.
The verdict
Somalia’s livestock export economy is not a development project. It is a rebuke to development projects. It shows African farmers and traders do not lack skill, diligence or entrepreneurial instinct. They lack what Somali commerce has managed to assemble: open markets, practical infrastructure, trusted payment systems and a state that performs essential functions and then steps aside.
Development banks and bilateral agencies did not build this. They cannot mass-produce it. If they were candid, they would concede that far too much of their approach to African agriculture has been a costly misallocation, enriching corporations, empowering political elites and leaving rural communities with less land, less water and less dignity.
The question is not whether the industry can learn from Somalia. The question is whether it is willing to be taught.
By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
