gaps

Hassan IstiilaFriday April 24, 2026 On a dusty roadside in Elasha Biyaha, some 15 kilometers from Mogadishu, Sharmarke Aden sits in his bajaj, thumbs moving over a Samsung phone as he tries again and again to pull up his digital national ID. The app, eAqoonsi, sits at the center of Somalia’s drive to take public services online. In the best-case scenario, it should spare Aden the expense and lost time of traveling to a registration center and standing in long lines, all while sacrificing a day’s earnings. Instead, patchy…

Somalia’s e-visa data breach has spiraled from a technical failure into a national test of digital governance, exposing at least 35,000 applicant records and prompting warnings from the United Kingdom and the United States. Launched Sept. 1, 2025, as a flagship Digital Public Good meant to secure borders and modernize services, the platform instead revealed how fragile the country’s digital public infrastructure remains without guardrails, oversight and trust. At stake is more than cybersecurity. The incident has triggered…

In Paris, the Court of Auditors on Thursday morning delivered a report on France's civilian and military actions in the G5 Sahel and their relationship to official development assistance. Conclusions: there are gaps in the monitoring of development assistance in the Sahel and security and development measures suffer from a lack of coordination…