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Women’s Political Exclusion in Somaliland: A Call for Change
By Jawahir Yusuf H. Adam
Somaliland is often celebrated for its peace, stability and home-grown democratic institutions—a remarkable achievement in a turbulent region. Yet behind this progress lies a painful contradiction: women, who constitute roughly half of Somaliland’s population, remain almost invisible in its political institutions.
Somaliland women have not been absent from nation-building. They have educated families, built businesses, supported communities and carried enormous responsibilities through some of the country’s most difficult periods. Yet when political power is distributed, they remain largely excluded. This is not simply a question of numbers. It is a question of whether Somaliland’s democracy can truly claim to represent its people.
Today, Somaliland’s 164-member Parliament consists of an 82-seat elected House of Representatives and an 82-member House of Elders, or Guurti. There are currently no women in either chamber. The figures from the 2021 parliamentary and local elections were particularly stark. Of the 246 candidates who contested the 82 seats in the House of Representatives, only 13 were women, and none was elected. In the local council elections, only three women were elected among 220 councilors.
The problem is not disappearing with time. The parliamentary and local elections scheduled for 31 May 2026 were postponed, and in April 2026 the House of Elders approved a 27-month extension of the terms of the House of Representatives and local councils. Unless meaningful reforms are made before the next elections, Somaliland risks extending this democratic deficit for several more years. This should concern every Somaliland citizen—not only women.
A Wider Muslim Legacy of Women’s Leadership
The exclusion of women from political leadership is sometimes defended in the name of culture, tradition or religion. But history tells a different story. Across the Muslim world, women have reached the highest levels of political leadership. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey and Indonesia, among others, have been led by women.
Somaliland itself has produced women of exceptional leadership. Madam Edna Adan Ismail, who served as Somaliland’s first woman Foreign Minister, demonstrated that Somaliland women can operate at the highest levels of public life. Nor is women’s leadership alien to Islamic history. Queen Arwa al-Sulayhi ruled Yemen for decades, while Shajar al-Durr briefly ruled Egypt in the thirteenth century. If Muslim women elsewhere have led governments, why should Somaliland women be told that they are capable of healing the nation, feeding the nation, educating the nation and building the nation—but not leading the nation?
Women’s Leadership in Africa
Across Africa, there are encouraging examples of women’s growing participation in political leadership. Rwanda stands out as a global leader in women’s parliamentary representation, with women holding approximately 63.8% of seats in its lower house, the highest proportion in the world. Senegal has also made significant progress, with women holding more than 40% of seats in its National Assembly. Tanzania has had a woman president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, since 2021. Ethiopia offers another important example. In 2018, Sahle-Work Zewde became the country’s first female president, while historic gender-parity reforms saw women appointed to 50% of ministerial positions. These African examples demonstrate that women’s political exclusion is neither inevitable nor irreversible. Somaliland, which takes pride in its democratic achievements, should draw lessons from these experiences and take concrete steps to ensure that women have a meaningful place in political decision-making.
The Roots of Exclusion in Somaliland
1. Clan Politics
Clan politics is one of the most difficult challenges Somaliland faces in building a modern, effective state. It is important to acknowledge that the clan system played a historic role in helping Somaliland achieve peace in the 1990s. The argument is not that clan structures can simply be abolished overnight. The question is whether a system that once helped resolve conflict should continue to determine political representation indefinitely.
Somaliland’s political system remains deeply influenced by clan calculations. Political parties navigate clan arithmetic, while traditional elders continue to play an important role in political selection and representation. This disproportionately disadvantages women, who can find themselves caught between their father’s clan and their husband’s clan, making it more difficult to secure the backing of traditional power structures.
When political representation is determined primarily by lineage rather than ability, meritocracy suffers. The consequences include political stagnation, entrenched patronage, reduced opportunities for merit-based leadership, continuing clan competition and a weakened national identity.
Somaliland cannot aspire to build a modern state while allowing clan identity to remain the principal gateway to political power. The objective should not be to erase clan identity from society, but to prevent it from determining who is entitled to lead.
2. Cultural and Social Constraints
Traditional gender expectations continue to confine many women primarily to domestic and family responsibilities, while public leadership is often regarded as a man’s domain. But Somaliland’s own history challenges this assumption.
During the collapse of the Somali state in 1991 and the years of conflict and hardship that followed, women became indispensable to the survival of families and communities. They worked, traded, educated children, cared for households and helped rebuild social and economic life. Why, then, should political leadership remain the one area in which their capabilities are questioned?
Somaliland’s Constitution provides an important foundation for change. Article 8 states that all citizens shall enjoy equal rights and obligations before the law and shall not be accorded precedence on grounds including clan, birth, gender, property or status. Article 36 specifically addresses the rights of women and provides for equality of rights, freedoms and duties. The principle is therefore not foreign to Somaliland’s constitutional order. The challenge is to turn that principle into political reality.
What Must Change
The postponement of the elections should not simply become another delay. It should become an opportunity to correct a democratic imbalance that has persisted for decades.
First, Somaliland should introduce a meaningful gender quota or reserved seats for women in the electoral law. Civil society organizations have advocated a 30 percent quota for many years. In 2020, Somaliland’s three political parties—UCID, Kulmiye and Waddani—agreed to field six women candidates each in the 2021 parliamentary elections. UCID fulfilled its commitment by fielding six women, while Kulmiye fielded four and Waddani three. Yet none won a seat. If women’s representation is to be treated as a democratic and constitutional principle, it requires an enforceable mechanism.
Second, political parties must put women in genuinely winnable positions. Simply placing a handful of women on a candidate list can create the appearance of inclusion without producing representation. Women must be given realistic opportunities to win—not merely opportunities to participate.
Third, women must have a place in the House of Elders. The Guurti is an important institution in Somaliland’s political system, yet women are absent from it. If traditional structures are to remain part of Somaliland’s political architecture, women must not be excluded. At minimum, Somaliland should establish a mechanism for women’s representation in the Guurti through seats reserved for women nominated by their communities.
Fourth, the financial barriers facing women candidates must be addressed. Campaigning is expensive, and women frequently lack the financial networks and political patronage available to male candidates. The state, political parties and civil society should develop transparent mechanisms to help qualified women compete on a more equal footing. The 2021 election demonstrated that the barrier is not simply a shortage of capable women. There were women willing to run. The system failed to provide them with a level playing field.
Women’s Inclusion Is Not Charity—It Is Nation-Building
Somaliland has every right to be proud of what it has achieved. It has built peace after war, developed functioning institutions under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, held competitive elections and experienced peaceful transfers of power. These achievements deserve recognition.
But democracy is not only about holding elections. It is also about who gets the opportunity to participate, who gets heard and who gets to exercise political power. A democracy in which nearly half the population is virtually absent from Parliament is incomplete.
Women do not need to be given political power as charity. They need the barriers preventing them from competing for that power to be removed. Nor should women’s political participation be presented as a concession to foreign donors or international organizations. It is in Somaliland’s own national interest. Women’s participation can strengthen social cohesion, broaden the talent pool from which leaders are chosen and make political institutions more representative.
Somaliland has already demonstrated that it can challenge assumptions about what is possible. It built peace out of war and institutions under difficult circumstances. Now it must break another barrier: the assumption that political leadership belongs primarily to men and to clans.
Let us not abolish our history. Let us learn from it.
Let us prevent clan from becoming a ceiling on national ambition.
Let us choose merit over lineage, inclusion over exclusion, and national identity over narrow political arithmetic.
And above all, let us ensure that Somaliland’s daughters are empowered to lead.
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Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions or perspectives of Somaliland Chronicle and its staff.
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