COVIDED: COVID 19 and Education in Somalia/Somaliland
This report examines how COVID-19 control measures disrupted already fragile education systems in Somalia/Somaliland, exposing and deepening structural inequalities. Drawing on extensive field interviews, it highlights how crisis responses often reinforced exclusion rather than mitigating it.
Introduction
Between June and September 2020, this team, composed of staff from Transparency Solutions (TS) - Peter Campbell, Mustafe Elmi, Latif Ismail, Sandra McNeill, Abdi Rubac, Asma Saed Ali, Amel Saeed and Mohamed Shidane – and the University of Bristol (Eric Herring) conducted the COVIDED project on COVID-19 and Education in Somalia/Somaliland. In 1991 Somaliland unilaterally declared its independence from Somalia. Somaliland has been self-governing ever since but has not been recognised internationally as a sovereign state. This ambiguity of being both not in and in Somalia explains why we refer to Somalia when referring to the federal level, to Somaliland when referring to Somaliland alone and Somalia/Somaliland when referring to both. The project aimed to understand the impact of COVID-19 response on education in Somalia/Somaliland. It sought to do so as something valuable in itself because it is important to know what harm is caused to education by COVID-19 responses, to know whether measures to counteract those harms are effective or exacerbate inequalities, and to draw lessons for how to better prepare for and respond to such emergencies. The research was also important as an activity to feed into the developing TESF Somalia/Somaliland Country Background Paper and the TESF Call for Proposals (invited in the case of Somalia/Somaliland) as part of its Network Plus projects. The project relates explicitly to the overall purposes of TESF, the themes related to COVID-19 as set out in the no-cost extension proposal and the specific context, issues and needs in Somalia/Somaliland.
Keywords
- COVID-19 education impact; Somalia education system; Somaliland schooling disruptions; educational inequality; remote learning access Africa; crisis response education policy; pastoralist education access; low-income education systems