Ayan A. Diiriye
In the late 1980s an 18-year-old Somali named Abdi left his rural village for Mogadishu. His elder brother, Ali, stayed behind. The decision seemed unremarkable at the time. Nearly four decades later it looks structural.
Abdi built a modest but stable urban life. He married, entered the churn of the capital’s informal and later formal economy, and sent his children to university. All graduated. Ali also married and raised a large family in the countryside. But recurrent droughts, thin markets and skeletal public services left his children without formal education and the household in persistent precarity.
The brothers’ diverging fortunes capture a continental shift. Africa is urbanising faster than any other region, and in Somalia the balance has tipped: for the first time, more people live in towns and cities than in rural areas.
The arithmetic of urbanisation
In 1980 only about 27% of Africans lived in urban areas, according to the United Nations. By 2023 the share had climbed to roughly 44%. By mid-century it is projected to exceed 60%. Africa is adding between 20m and 25m urban residents each year—more than the population of many countries.
The economic logic is straightforward. Cities such as Lagos, Nairobi and Addis Ababa generate a disproportionate share of national output. They concentrate ports, airports, universities, banks and fibre-optic cables. Firms cluster. Labour markets deepen. Ideas travel faster on asphalt than across arid plains.
Somalia’s trajectory fits the pattern, though its drivers are unusually compressed: conflict, state collapse and climate shocks accelerated what elsewhere unfolded more gradually.
Somalia’s tipping point
Half a century ago Somalia was overwhelmingly pastoral and rural. Today cities dominate demographically. Hargeisa, Bosaso, Beledweyne and Kismayo have expanded sharply, alongside Mogadishu. Informal settlements ring their outskirts, populated by families displaced by drought or drawn by commerce.
Urbanisation in Somalia is propelled by both pull and push. The pull is economic concentration: telecommunications firms, construction companies, traders and service providers operate primarily in cities. The push is climatic. Repeated failed rainy seasons have ravaged pastoral livelihoods. When livestock perish, so too does savings.
For rural households dependent on rain-fed agriculture or herding, the margin for error is thin. Schools are sparse; healthcare distant; financial services embryonic. Migration becomes not merely aspirational but adaptive.
The multiplier effect
Abdi’s timing was fortuitous. Mogadishu, despite insecurity, became a laboratory of private enterprise. Telecommunications boomed. Remittance-linked finance deepened. Construction reshaped the skyline. Even informal work offered something rare in drought-prone hinterlands: regular cash.
More decisive was education. Universities multiplied in urban Somalia over the past two decades. Abdi’s children attended them. Tertiary education altered the family’s trajectory, embedding it within a modernising urban middle class.
Ali’s children, by contrast, remained tethered to a subsistence economy. Geography, more than aptitude, dictated outcome.
The remittance bridge
Yet the story is not one of severed ties. Each month Abdi sends money to his brother. The transfers cover school fees for younger relatives, medical expenses and, in lean seasons, basic consumption. After severe droughts they help restock livestock.
Such flows are not trivial. Somalia receives an estimated $1.5bn–2bn annually in remittances—a sum that rivals or exceeds many forms of foreign assistance. Urban earners and the diaspora effectively redistribute income to rural kin. The city subsidises the countryside.
Urbanisation, then, does not dissolve extended-family economics; it reconfigures them. Abdi’s stability underwrites Ali’s resilience.
Promise and peril
The rise of the African city is often equated with prosperity. It should not be romanticised. Rapid expansion strains housing, sanitation and labour markets. Informal settlements grow faster than infrastructure. Youth unemployment remains stubbornly high.
Somalia’s urban majority is therefore both milestone and warning. Without planned expansion, investment in transport and utilities, and support for small enterprise, cities risk replicating rural poverty at greater density.
Equally, neglecting rural transformation would entrench the push factors. Irrigation, agro-processing, rural roads and digital connectivity could temper distress migration and make mobility a choice rather than compulsion.
A continental re-balancing
Abdi and Ali began in the same village, born a year apart. Their divergence was not ordained by talent but by location. One plugged into an urban ecosystem of markets and schools. The other remained exposed to the volatility of climate and commodity.
Somalia’s demographic crossover signals a broader continental rebalancing. Economic gravity is shifting—from pasture to port, from livestock market to lecture hall.
And yet, the monthly remittance reminds one that Africa’s urban century will not be built in isolation from its rural past. The road to Mogadishu changed Abdi’s destiny. It also, indirectly, sustains Ali’s.
Africa’s future may be written in its cities. But its cities are still financed, emotionally and economically, by the village
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