Look at the photo from July 15, 2026, when Somali National University officially launched the Somali National Artificial Intelligence Centre (SNAIC), and count the women in the room. You’ll need one hand. Everyone in that photo is proud, and they should be. SNAIC is a real milestone for the country. But somewhere in that room, decisions are being made about AI technologies that could eventually influence Somalia’s classrooms, clinics, government offices, and other public services for the next generation. And it looks like almost none of the people making those decisions will ever have to live as a Somali woman does.
No one plotted this. It happened one closed door at a time. Nearly 19% of Somali children are pulled out of school to work or care for family, and girls make up more than two-thirds of them. Four in ten Somali women are married before adulthood, and once a girl is married, her odds of staying in school collapse; only 16% of married 15-to-17-year-olds are still enrolled. When humanitarian funding dried up in 2025, 477 learning spaces closed, and the girls already closest to the edge fell off first. By the time anyone is old enough and credentialed enough to sit in SNAIC’s founding meeting, the girls who might have been there have already been filtered out by poverty, by marriage, by a family that needed her at home instead of in a classroom. The one woman in that photo isn’t a token. She’s a survivor of a system built to produce exactly this outcome.
And this isn’t for lack of trying. Somalia’s National Communications Authority has run more than 35 targeted ICT training programs for girls since 2018 and holds an annual Girls in ICT Day drawing government officials, telecom operators, and international partners. That effort is real. But look at what it’s up against: by the NCA’s own account, Somali women remain a small minority of the country’s ICT professionals, despite years of targeted training efforts. A handful of training days a year cannot outrun an education system that is filtering girls out at every stage before they ever reach one. The gap isn’t a sign the programs failed—it’s a sign of how much bigger the fix needs to be than what’s currently on the table.
This isn’t an abstract fairness argument, and it isn’t hypothetical. A November 2025 report by the National Union of Somali Journalists documented 79 cases of gender-based violence against Somali women journalists between 2023 and 2025 deepfakes, cloned voices, and coordinated online campaigns built specifically to shame and silence them, with researchers warning the real number is far higher because most women never report it. The threat is already here.
Now put that fact next to SNAIC’s mandate: building home-grown Somali-language NLP and AI systems. When founding discussions and development teams lack meaningful female representation, they are far less likely to treat deepfake harassment, coordinated smear campaigns, or online stalking as design priorities because those are not threats they disproportionately experience. It’s also less likely to notice when a Somali-language model, trained on oral tradition and everyday speech, quietly absorbs harmful cultural norms about who gets to speak, whose word is trusted, and what a woman is allowed to say without consequence, then hands those norms back as neutral fact inside a government chatbot or an educational platform.
And it’s exactly the kind of blind spot that can appear in something as ordinary as a civil-service hiring tool: trained on Somalia’s current, male-dominated workforce, it may learn to reproduce those patterns unless developers actively test for bias, filtering out qualified women before a human ever reads their applications. None of this requires malice. It only requires nobody in the room whose job it is to ask, “What does this do to her?” That’s the cost of a homogeneous founding team not one scandal, but a thousand small defaults all pointing in the same direction, embedded so early that by the time anyone notices, it’s cheaper to leave them broken than to rebuild them.
The founding moment is the only moment this is cheap to fix. Once the models are trained, the contracts are signed, and the systems are live in a ministry, correcting course means tearing out infrastructure, not editing a hiring list. So the pressure has to land now, on the three groups who can still move something:
- International donors: UN agencies and other funders should make future funding for SNAIC’s next phase conditional on meaningful gender representation on steering committees and development teams, while also funding fellowships that place Somali women in the room as researchers, not observers.
- Somali ministries and SNU leadership: Put an independent audit board of female data scientists, sociologists, and legal experts in front of every NLP training set and moderation policy before it ships—including specific safeguards against AI-facilitated harassment and deepfakes—and open real, subsidized pathways for girls into computer science before they’re old enough to be married out of the pipeline.
- Every Somali watching this happen: Ask, out loud and in public, who built the system you’re being asked to trust, what it learned from, and whether it was ever tested on someone whose life doesn’t look like the men who built it.
The photo from that launch will keep circulating whether or not anyone acts on it. What decides how this story ends isn’t the picture; it’s whether the people with the power to open that door do it now, while it still just means adding chairs, instead of a decade from now, when it means dismantling a system that was never built to see her in the first place.
Sources: Geneva Global Hub for Education in Emergencies (EiE Hub), Country Brief: Somalia’s Education Crisis (December 2025); Somalia National Communications Authority, Gender and Digital Inclusion Research (April 2025); Somalia National Communications Authority, Girls in ICT Day 2025; National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ), Targeted Online, Unsafe Offline: Violence Against Women Journalists in Somalia (November 2025); and official launch materials from the Somali National University (July 15, 2026).
