The Women Running the Horn's Trade Networks

Much of the Horn's cross-border trade is conducted by women, and most of it is invisible in official figures.

The pattern is long established. Women dominate market trade in foodstuffs, textiles, household goods and consumer items across the region, and cross-border movement of those goods between Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti and Kenya is substantially organised through networks that are largely female.

These networks operate on informal credit. Goods move on trust between traders who have dealt with each other, sometimes across generations, without written contract or bank involvement. Enforcement is reputational, and exclusion from the network is the sanction.

Because these transactions do not pass through formal customs channels or banks, they do not appear in trade statistics. That has a policy consequence: infrastructure and trade facilitation are planned around the flows that are measured, and border facilities designed for container freight are frequently unusable by traders moving goods in quantities that fill a minibus.

Mobile money has changed part of this. Digital payment allows value to move without cash crossing a border physically, which reduces both risk and the need for intermediaries.

The constraints that remain are the familiar ones: limited access to formal credit at reasonable rates, exposure at border crossings, and business registration processes designed around a firm rather than a trader.

People of the Horn profiles are interview-based. This overview introduces the section; individual profiles follow.