By Conrad Heine
Ismail Ahmed has done a lot in his time: the Somaliland-born, London-based tech entrepreneur is best known as the co-founder of World Remit, the global money transfer company that serves so many Somalis and many others worldwide. It is a role that has rewarded him handsomely and earned him the title of most influential black Briton on the 2020 Powerlist of the 100 most influential people of African or African Caribbean heritage in the UK. And just part of a storied career also taking in advisory roles at the United Nations and the World Bank.
It has not always been a smooth journey: in the 2000s, Mr Ahmed, who first came to the UK as a refugee from Somaliland in his early 20s, and has returned many times since, was fired by the UN Development Programme after alleging corruption in its Somalia programme. But Mr Ahmed was able to turn this to the good, using the compensation he was eventually awarded for this wrongful dismissal to found World Remit in 2010: soon, the company went on to set the standard for mobile money transfer, in the best tradition of Somali innovation in that particular field.
Nowadays, Mr Ahmed is harnessing that determination and creativity, and some of those same innovations, in a different direction. Since stepping back from leading World Remit, he has busied himself with the Sahamiye Foundation ("Sahamiye" being Somali for "Pathfinder"), a non-profit organisation he co-founded and funded by himself, incorporated in 2019 with the intention of giving back to his home community. “When creative minds are coupled with caring hearts, we can make good health, good standards of living and good education available to everybody.”
Since its start, the Foundation, which employs a large team in London and Hargeysa, has involved itself in crisis response, including to the Covid pandemic with mask and equipment provision, with 2,000 water tankers distributed to communities affected by the severe drought in 2022 (thus helping to prevent displacement and school closures) and with cash transfers to the female market stallholders displaced by the huge Waheen Market fire in Hargeysa in April 2022.
Mr Ahmed is proud of efforts there.“We swiftly allocated $313,700 to 750 women traders. This meant they were able to get back to doing business very quickly.”
These timely and agile actions, as well as being vital in themselves, are also geared towards a key goal of the Foundation: to build trust in order to boost access to education and, in particular, improve literacy. “We adopt a responsive approach during crises, because we know they severely impact access to education.”
For it is boosting education, and literacy in particular, that lies at the centre of the Foundation’s mission, and one of its flagship projects, one that draws on World Remit’s innovative mobile-technology tradition —the Daariz Somali language app, launched in 2021, and created, as the Foundation puts it, to “empower people with lifelong literacy skills that enable them to thrive and reach their full potential.”
Literacy, at crisis levels in many parts of the world, is especially so on the Horn of Africa, where protracted conflict, drought, lack of schools, population displacement, nomadic pastoralism, and more have pooled to make one of the lowest global literacy rates. According to 2022 data from Unicef, the UN’s agency for children, around three in every four adults cannot read and write and one child in four is not in school. School enrolment stands at only 30% and, of those actually in school, more than 70% of late primary school students struggle to read in their mother tongue.
It is a situation, Mr Ahmed points out, that stands in marked contrast to the period before Somalia’s collapse when, despite the privations of the Barre regime, literacy bloomed and grew, following the regime’s adoption of a standard written Somali language (using a Latin script) in 1972, soon followed by a massive language teaching and literacy campaign, remembered fondly even in Hargeysa, Somalia’s cultural centre of the time, which suffered so greatly when the regime bombed the city in 1988. The campaign fostered a strong local publishing industry, and by 1990, according to the UN, Somali literacy rates had climbed to 24% overall. But then came, Mr Ahmed points out, Somalia’s collapse and all that followed, and the “relapse” to where things are today.
Mr Ahmed sees Daariz as a way of recreating that literacy campaign digitally. An innovation born of the pandemic, when, at home in London during lockdown and using the time to teach his own children Somali, he came up with the idea of using mobile phones to tackle the learning crisis in his birth country. “Working from home, I had time.” Taking inspiration from World Remit’s own mobile money innovations, he harnessed a team of developers from “all over—East London, Eastern Europe, Hargeysa, the key product manager in San Francisco”, but mostly in London, to get things moving.
The Daariz Somali language app
Now, the app features a “digital library” of some 60 simple Somali stories, chosen and edited by Mr Ahmed himself. The Foundation’s plans for Daariz are ambitious: for a suite of free education apps and e-learning platforms to make education as accessible as possible to as many as possible, covering subjects such as science, mathematics and Arabic. For now, the first app is Daariz Somali, with an English one also well underway, offering lessons in reading, writing and comprehension, aiming to help users, whether in school or out, to achieve functional literacy in Somali and English. The Foundation claims it reduces the time to become functionally literate from 450 hours to 50 hours, thus preventing illiteracy relapse.
Users are engaged through interactive games, audio tuition, personalised feedback and a rewards system, with short texts, stories and activities suitable for all ages. Gamification has a Somali touch: along the way, users are engaged by the opportunity to earn tokens in the form of virtual camels, cherished symbols of wealth in Somali culture. 100 camels equals functional literacy (with more than 5m earned so far). Reading speed and comprehension are emphasised and measured, with feedback given along the way, on the way to a target of 60-90 words per minute with 95% accuracy.
Mubarak Abdi Mahdi, camel herder, who uses the Daariz app to learn the Somali language
Along the way, the app tracks learner metrics to tailor the learning experience, and—most importantly—is free and fully available online, once downloaded to any basic smartphone. A key aspect for one of its key user bases—nomadic people in remote areas. For, while the app is for everyone, Mr Ahmed, a “digital nomad” himself, and the Foundation are especially targeting nomadic pastoralists and other rural inhabitants, where schooling is often entirely absent. As the camel herders gather digital camels alongside their actual herds, their literacy and confidence can grow and be retained, is the hope.
Also highly prioritised are women and girls, who face particular educational barriers, making up 60% of those without schooling or basic literacy skills. The Foundation boasts a nearly even split between the app’s users – some 48% female (170,000 users) and 52% male. The Foundation’s outreach workers have reached out to female domestic workers and market traders—such as the women of Waheen, many of whom have missed schooling altogether, and who, Mr Ahmed points out, “were losing money. They need literacy to navigate mobile money transactions in the cashless local economy.”
Daariz’s reach so far is impressive—the Foundation claims users of over 350,000 to date, through collaboration with schools and community centres, regular speed reading and comprehension competitions across the Horn (in 2022, the reading competition drew over 17,000 participants across 16 cities, with winners receiving a total of $40,000 in cash prizes), community collaboration and, of course, social media.
Mr Ahmed sees the competitions as a particular success, highlighting that Daariz reaches across the whole Horn, not just Somaliland. In Puntland, the competition not only received a presidential welcome, but nearly half of the participants were women and girls. Meanwhile, the app has been adopted in Somalia, Djibouti and the Somali Region of Ethiopia, where the University of Jijiga is a Foundation partner. While the region may be beset by rivalries and hostilities, on the need for improved literacy, Mr Ahmed stresses, there is common agreement. “We have been welcomed all over the region.”
And in Somaliland, his home region, Mr Ahmed and the Foundation are working with the Ministry of Education to get Daariz used in schools as an educational resource. “We are trusted because we are not coming from the international community… we are local people, who have not forgotten our culture while abroad.” Trust is built by the Foundation’s long-term vision. “Unlike a lot of the aid agencies, this is not a three- or four-year project. We will be around for much longer.” Daariz’s reach even extends to the many madrassas, where Sheikhs have requested the adding of Arabic to the app. “We are targeting Koranic schools because that is where the students are… madrassas have welcomed the idea we could partner with them.”
As Mr Ahmed and the Sahamiye Foundation look to the future, the hope is that Daariz will grow and grow. To extend its reach, the Foundation is partnering with schools and ministries, and, to get the app into many more hands, is experimenting with donated phones preloaded with the app that will be owned by schools, and with solar chargers for those rural users. The English app, says Mr Ahmed, is progressing well, and hopes are that the app will grow to encompass more subjects and even issue certificates of attainment. “We are institution building, but being transparent. We want the authorities to understand what we are doing.” As well as more stories, textbooks, whole books and articles are being added to the digital library, and there are plans to reach out to other disadvantaged groups—such as minority clans, marginalised in the education system as everywhere.
As for Mr Ahmed himself, he wants to ensure that Daariz, and the Foundation, have a life beyond him. “I probably stayed a little too long at World Remit—I think the first ten years is where I want to be deeply involved.” And as ever, his targets are ambitious—“to reach one million users.” With the energy of Mr Ahmed and Sahamiye Foundation’s dedicated team, coupled with the great need for a tool such as Daariz, it is hardly an unrealistic ambition.
Mubarak Abdi Mahdi using the Daariz app
The Sahamiye Foundation is at sahamiyefoundation.org.
Conrad Heine is a long-standing Society member. Originally from Aotearoa/New Zealand, he is a London-based journalist often working in the Horn of Africa.
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