By Hassan Mohamed
Oshen LLC
Somalia is moving toward digital systems.
From education platforms to financial services and public administration, the language of “digital transformation” is no longer aspirational. It is now part of the national direction. Government leaders, development partners, and private actors all speak of modernization as both necessary and urgent.
At the recent National Identification Conference in Mogadishu, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud captured this moment clearly when he stated, “Let us embrace modern systems; our nation cannot remain where it was 35 years ago.” It is a powerful statement. It reflects a country that understands the importance of change. But it also raises a more difficult question. What kind of digital systems are being built and whether they are capable of working together. Because the risk is no longer that Somalia will fail to digitize. The risk is that Somalia will digitize the same fragmentation that already exists. Digital Public Infrastructure, often referred to as DPI, is increasingly presented as the solution.
At its core, DPI is not a single platform or application. It is the foundation that allows systems to function together. It enables governments, institutions, and citizens to interact at scale through shared digital systems. In most cases, this foundation includes identity systems, payment systems, and data exchange layers. When these components are designed to work together, they create an ecosystem where services can scale, data can move, and institutions can coordinate. But infrastructure is not defined by its components alone. It is defined by how those components connect.
Problem 1: The Structural Problem – Fragmentation
Somalia’s current digital landscape is active, but not yet coordinated. Across sectors, systems are being introduced independently. Education platforms operate without connection to identity systems. Health data is collected but not easily shared. Institutional records remain isolated, often stored in formats that cannot be verified outside their original source.
The outcome is predictable. Data is duplicated. Records become inconsistent. Visibility at the national level remains limited. Even when individual systems function, the overall ecosystem does not. This is not a failure of ambition. It is a failure of structure.
Problem 2: The Governance Problem – Weak Coordination
Digital infrastructure is often treated as a technical problem. In reality, it is a governance problem. Systems require coordination. They require clarity in roles and responsibilities. They require standards that ensure interoperability and accountability. Without these elements, digital systems become parallel efforts rather than shared infrastructure.
Somalia has already encountered similar challenges in other sectors, where coordination and oversight determine whether national initiatives succeed or stall. The same dynamic applies here. Technology alone does not create alignment. Institutions do. Yet even where systems are aligned, another challenge emerges one that is less visible but more fundamental.
Problem 3: The Trust Deficit
In many cases, the issue is not whether data exists. It is whether that data can be believed. Can a record be verified independently? Can one institution rely on the data produced by another? Can a digital document be used with confidence outside the system that created it?
In recent months, Somalia has already experienced the risks of introducing digital systems without sufficient attention to trust and security. The launch of the national electronic visa system was intended to modernize immigration and improve efficiency. However, shortly after deployment, the platform suffered a major breach, exposing sensitive personal data of tens of thousands of applicants, including passport details and identity information.
The incident was not simply a cybersecurity failure. It exposed a deeper structural issue: the system had been deployed without robust safeguards for verification, access control, and data protection. In effect, a system designed to strengthen national processes instead undermined confidence in digital platforms. This is precisely the risk facing Digital Public Infrastructure when trust is treated as an afterthought rather than a foundational layer. These questions are not abstract. They are practical, and they are immediate.
Use case 1: Education Sector
In education, for example, academic credentials remain difficult to verify. Certificates are often paper-based, manually processed, and vulnerable to forgery. Even when digitized, they frequently lack a mechanism for independent validation. As a result, institutions continue to rely on manual checks. Employers hesitate. Students face delays. Digitization, in this case, does not eliminate friction. It simply changes its form.
This is where current discussions around Digital Public Infrastructure begin to show their limitations. Identity systems, payment systems, and data exchange layers are essential. But they do not, on their own, solve the question of verification.
A system may be digital. It may be accessible. It may even be interoperable. But if its outputs cannot be trusted, its value remains limited. Trust is not an outcome of infrastructure. It is a requirement for it. A more resilient approach to digital infrastructure is beginning to take shape, particularly in systems where verification and trust are critical. Rather than centralizing all information within a single system, this model introduces a structural separation between data and verification.
Sensitive information such as student records, academic outcomes, and institutional data remains securely stored within controlled environments, managed by the issuing institutions. At the same time, a separate verification layer is created, designed to confirm the authenticity of those records without exposing their underlying content.
This verification layer relies on cryptographic methods to generate a unique representation of each record, along with its status and time of issuance. These elements can be independently checked, allowing third parties to confirm whether a record is valid, unchanged, and issued by a trusted authority.
The result is a system in which institutions retain full control over private data, while verification becomes immediate, reliable, and independent. In practical terms, this introduces a dedicated trust layer into digital infrastructure—one that strengthens confidence across institutions without compromising data privacy. In simple terms, the system answers a critical question instantly: Is this record real?
In Somalia, early efforts are beginning to explore this direction. Systems such as the National Digital Trust System, or NDTS, are being developed to address challenges in credential verification by combining institutional processes with secure verification mechanisms. These systems are not designed to replace institutions. They are designed to support them.
They operate as infrastructure quietly, in the background, enabling trust where it previously required manual effort. Startups like Oshen are part of this emerging space, focusing on practical implementations that align with broader Digital Public Infrastructure principles while addressing specific challenges in sectors like education.
Somalia’s Strategic Position
Somalia is often described as being behind in its digital development. In reality, it is better understood as being early. Unlike countries shaped by decades of legacy systems, Somalia retains a degree of flexibility that is increasingly rare. The absence of deeply entrenched infrastructure creates space to design systems more deliberately, with interoperability, coordination, and long-term scalability in mind from the outset.
This presents a meaningful opportunity. Digital systems can be structured to work together from the beginning, rather than being retrofitted over time. Trust mechanisms can be embedded into the architecture itself rather than added later in response to failure. Fragmentation, which has challenged many other systems, can be avoided before it becomes systemic. However, this window is not indefinite.
As digital systems expand, early design decisions become embedded. Once established, they shape how institutions interact, how data is managed, and how services evolve. Reversing poor architectural choices at a later stage is not only technically complex, but financially and institutionally costly.
The current moment therefore carries both opportunity and responsibility. The choices made now will determine whether Somalia’s digital systems remain adaptable and coherent, or whether they reproduce the very fragmentation they were intended to resolve.
From Projects to Infrastructure
The shift required is not primarily technological. It is conceptual. Many digital initiatives begin with a straightforward question: what solution should be built to address a specific problem. While this approach can produce short-term results, it often leads to the creation of isolated systems that do not integrate or scale effectively. A more fundamental question is needed.
What kind of infrastructure is required to ensure that multiple solutions can function together, consistently, and at scale? This distinction is not minor. It defines the difference between systems that operate independently and those that form part of a coherent digital ecosystem.
Projects are designed to address immediate needs. Infrastructure, by contrast, shapes long-term capability. It determines whether systems can interoperate, whether data can be trusted across institutions, and whether services can evolve without constant reinvention.
In the context of Somalia’s digital development, this shift from building individual solutions to designing shared infrastructure will ultimately determine whether digital transformation produces lasting impact or reproduces existing inefficiencies in a new form. The difference between the two is not subtle. It determines whether digital systems reduce complexity or reinforce it. It determines whether institutions can trust each other. It determines whether services can scale. It determines whether the system, as a whole, works.
The conversation around Digital Public Infrastructure should move beyond terminology. The issue is no longer whether Somalia will go digital. The issue is whether Somalia will build systems that can be trusted to work consistently, collectively, and at scale.
Hassan Mohamed
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Hassan Mohamed is the founder of Oshen, a digital infrastructure company focused on building trust systems and Digital Public Infrastructure solutions for emerging markets, with a particular focus on Somalia and East Africa. His work focuses on the intersection of governance, verification systems, and scalable digital infrastructure in fragile and developing contexts.
