In the highlands and river valleys of Somaliland, a familiar cycle has repeated itself for a generation: the rains fail, the herds and harvests thin, and international food aid arrives to fill the gap it left behind. A newly circulated agricultural policy brief argues that cycle can be broken — not through another emergency shipment, but through a long-term investment plan built on irrigation, seed, soil, and markets.

The brief, prepared by agricultural policy analyst Mawlid Musa Ibraim, lays out seventeen interlocking programs meant to move Somaliland’s farming sector “from a predominantly emergency-response approach toward long-term, productive, climate-resilient agricultural investment.” Its argument is direct: unreliable rainfall, water scarcity, degraded land, weak seed systems, and thin market access are not separate problems to be solved one at a time, but a single broken chain that has to be rebuilt end to end.

Agricultural transformation in Somaliland is not simply a matter of providing farmers with seeds or fertilizer. It requires an integrated development system that starts with land and water and ends with markets, processing, and profitable value chains. — Mawlid Musa Ibraim, agricultural policy brief

For a territory where agriculture underpins food security, rural income, and employment, the stakes of getting that chain right are difficult to overstate. The brief’s diagnosis is blunt about what has been holding it back: drought, water scarcity, degraded land, poor access to quality seed, weak technology, and market systems too fragile to reward the farmers who do manage a harvest.

The Seventeen, Grouped by Priority

The brief’s programs are not a flat checklist — it ranks five pillars as the highest priority for investment. Tap each to see the programs inside it.

The logic behind the diagram is central to the brief’s argument: a farmer who finally gets a good harvest thanks to a new well or drought-tolerant seed still loses if there is nowhere to store the crop, no road to move it, and no market willing to pay a fair price. “Agricultural development cannot succeed if farmers produce crops but cannot access profitable markets,” the brief states, calling for investment in collection centers, cold storage, packaging, and agro-processing alongside the fields themselves.

That same logic runs through the brief’s call for a national seed system — multiplication farms, storage facilities, and certification for drought-tolerant sorghum and climate-resilient maize varieties suited to Somaliland’s different agro-ecological zones — paired with soil-testing laboratories and erosion-control structures to keep the land itself productive over the long term.

Which crops, technologies, and irrigation systems are most suitable for each part of Somaliland? Research should answer that practical question. — Policy brief, Agricultural Research Program

Who Gets Left Out — and How the Brief Tries to Fix That

Two groups get their own dedicated program: smallholders locked out of credit, and the country’s young people and women.

Much of the brief’s middle section is concerned with access rather than production. It calls for an Agricultural Development Fund offering low-interest and Islamic-compliant financing, revolving funds, and agricultural insurance, on the grounds that many farmers simply cannot afford the seed, fertilizer, and irrigation equipment the rest of the plan depends on. Farmer cooperatives are proposed as a way to pool that buying power — for machinery, storage, and transport — with a specific instruction that “women and young people should be deliberately included.”

A separate Youth and Women in Agriculture Program goes further, proposing a “Young Farmers Program” that would combine training, land access, inputs, financing, and market access into a single entry point for young people, alongside dedicated support for women in horticulture, poultry, dairy processing, and food processing.

Five Pillars, One Sequence

The brief closes by ranking its own priorities — the order in which it argues Somaliland should build.

Whether Somaliland can finance a plan this size is the question the brief itself acknowledges it cannot answer alone. Its final program calls for public–private partnerships to draw in domestic investors, diaspora capital, agribusiness, and international development partners — a recognition that no single government budget covers irrigation, cold storage, seed systems, and market infrastructure at once.

Still, the brief’s core wager is one increasingly echoed by development economists working on the Horn of Africa: that resilience is built before the drought, not shipped in after it. For Somaliland’s farmers, that would mean a well before the next dry season rather than a food convoy during it.