The Engineers Building the Horn's Digital Infrastructure

A recognisable pattern has emerged across the Horn's technology sector: engineers educated in Europe, North America or the Gulf returning to build companies and infrastructure in Mogadishu, Addis Ababa, Hargeisa, Djibouti City and Asmara.

The pattern follows the shape of the region's migration history. Large numbers left during the conflicts and disruptions of the 1980s and 1990s, and their children were educated in the countries they settled in. That produced a cohort with technical training from established universities and family connections to the region.

What draws some of them back is the state of the market rather than sentiment alone. Systems that would be considered basic infrastructure elsewhere — payment rails, logistics software, digital identity, hospital records — are in some cases not built at all, and the opportunity to build them from a blank sheet is genuinely rarer in mature markets.

The advantages they bring are specific. Technical training, access to capital networks abroad, and familiarity with how comparable systems work elsewhere. The advantages they lack are equally specific: local regulatory knowledge, established commercial relationships, and an accurate sense of what customers will actually pay for.

The most durable ventures have tended to pair returning technical founders with local commercial partners, an arrangement that supplies both sides of that gap.

This section profiles individuals and their work. Every profile in People of the Horn is based on an interview conducted by this newsroom, with the subject's consent, and no profile is published without direct contact.