Foreign NGOs and companies regularly launch mobile-technology pilot projects to improve the prospects for the Somali population in small ways; we’ve seen attempts to build SMS-based job-matching platforms and remote-diagnosis mobile health-care systems, among others. Yet most are unsuccessful in establishing a foothold—unsurprising, given the exceptionally hostile security and business environment. So most of the innovation that comes from Somalia today comes from the Somalis themselves; in this as elsewhere in the developing world, the most creative solutions emerge at the local level, driven by necessity more than anything else.
The absence of government in Somalia has meant that the telecommunications sector is unregulated, which drives down prices because entrepreneurs can step in and build a network if they see an opportunity (and have a sufficient appetite for risk). This is a common pattern when a government stops functioning. In the weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein, a Bahraini telecom tried to expand into southern Iraq and capitalize on sectarian ties between that area, which is largely Shia, and Bahrain, which has a Shia majority, to win new customers. The occupying military forces, concerned about inflaming sectarian tensions, ultimately blocked the telecom’s venture.
The extreme laissez-faire business environment in Somalia has produced some of the cheapest local, international and Internet rates in Africa, making mobile usage far more possible for a deeply impoverished population. When members of the Somali diaspora in the United States call their family back home, their relatives will often hang up and call them back. Without a government demanding taxes, charging for licenses or imposing regulatory costs, telecoms can keep costs low to expand their subscriber base while still turning a profit. Somalia’s mobile penetration is much higher than one might expect, hovering somewhere between 20 and 25 percent. The four main telecom operators offer voice and data service across the country, and sixty to seventy miles into neighboring Kenya as well.
Despite these achievements in communications, Somalia remains an exceptionally insecure country, and insurgents have used the country’s connectivity to further this volatility. Al-Shabaab Islamist insurgents send threatening calls and messages to African Union peacekeepers. Islamist radicals impose bans on mobile banking platforms and sabotage telecommunications infrastructure. Pirates on the Somali coast use local telecom networks to communicate because they worry their satellite phones can be tracked by international warships. In a February 2012 report, the United Nations Security Council added the head of Somalia’s largest telecom, Hormuud, to its list of individuals subject to a travel ban after identifying him as one of al-Shabaab’s chief financiers. (The report also said the man, Ali Ahmed Nur Jim’ale, set up Hormuud’s mobile money-transfer system in order to facilitate anonymous funding to al-Shabaab.)
Certainly, the situation in Somalia is complex. But should the country emerge from its cocoon of instability anytime soon, the new government will surely find willing partners in the national telecom operators.
Ideally, reconstruction efforts strive not only to re-create what existed before, but to improve on the original and develop practices and institutions that reduce the risk of repeated disasters. The majority of postcrisis societies, while diverse in detail, have the same basic needs, roughly analogous to the basic components of state-building. These include administrative control of territory, a monopoly on the means of violence, sound management of public finances, investment in human capital, ensuring the provision of infrastructure and creating citizenship rights and duties.2 Efforts to meet these needs, while heavily dependent on the international community (financially, technically and diplomatically), must be led by the postcrisis state itself. If reconstruction is not seen as homegrown or at least consistent with the political and economic aims of the society, the likelihood of failure increases dramatically.
Technology will help protect property rights, safeguarding virtual records of real assets so that those assets can be quickly reclaimed when stability returns. Investors are not likely to put their money into a country where they feel insecure about the safety and ownership of their property. In post-invasion Iraq, three commissions were created to allow local people and returning exiles to reclaim or receive compensation for property seized during Saddam Hussein’s regime. A parallel authority was set up to resolve disputes. These were important steps in the reconstruction of Iraq, serving as a moderating factor to the exploitation of post-conflict instability and instances of claiming property by force. But despite their good intentions (more than 160,000 claims were received by 2011), these commissions were hampered by certain bureaucratic restrictions that trapped many claims in complicated litigation. In the future, states will learn from this Iraqi model that a more transparent and secure form of protection for property rights can forestall such hassles in the event of conflict. By creating online cadastral systems (i.e., online records systems of land values and boundaries) with mobile-enabled mapping software, governments will make it possible for citizens to visualize all public and private land and even submit minor disputes, like a fence boundary, to a sanctioned online arbiter.
In the future, people won’t just back up their data; they’ll back up their government. In the emerging reconstruction prototype, virtual institutions will exist in parallel with their physical counterparts and serve as a backup in times of need. Instead of having a physical building for a ministry, where all records are kept and services rendered, that information will be digitized and stored in the cloud, and many government functions will be conducted on online platforms. If a tsunami destroys a city, all ministries will continue to function with some competence virtually while they are reconstituted physically.
Virtual institutions will allow new or shell-shocked governments to maintain much of their effectiveness in the delivery of services, as well as keep those governments an integral part of all reconstruction efforts. Virtual institutions won’t be able to do everything that they might otherwise do, but they will be of enormous help. The department of social services, charged with allocating shelter, still needs physical outposts to interact with the population, but with more data it will be able to allocate beds efficiently and keep track of the resources available, among other things. A virtual military can’t instill the rule of law, but it can ensure that the military and police are paid, which will assuage some fears. While governments will still be somewhat wary of entrusting their data to cloud providers, the peace of mind that backed-up institutions ensure will still be enough to justify their creation.
These institutions will offer a safety net for the population too, guaranteeing that records are preserved, employers can pay salaries, and databases of citizens both in the country and in the diaspora will be maintained. All of this will accelerate local ownership of the reconstruction process and help limit the waste and corruption that typically follow a disaster or conflict. Governments may collapse and wars can destroy physical infrastructure, but virtual institutions will survive.