Building Resilient Cities and Creating Jobs in Somalia

Synopsis

The Somalia Urban Resilience Project Phase II (SURP-II) is helping seven cities across Somalia strengthen local government capacity, improve service delivery, and expand access to resilient urban infrastructure, building on World Bank-financed support since 2016. To date, nearly 700,000 people have benefited from improved urban infrastructure, more than 1 million have received life-saving drought assistance, and over 526,000 person-days of employment have been generated for 15,000 local workers; 51 percent of infrastructure beneficiaries are women.

Development Challenge

Somalia’s urbanization rate stands at 54 percent, with cities expanding at 4.3 percent annually—well above the African average. Climate shocks now rival conflict as a leading driver of displacement, accelerating the growth of informal settlements and overwhelming limited urban infrastructure. Between 2021 and 2023, four consecutive failed rainy seasons triggered the country’s worst drought in 40 years, affecting over 7.8 million people and displacing more than 1.3 million. At the same time, sub-national governments receive minimal recurrent budget transfers, operate with skeletal staffing with limited technical capacity, and generate negligible own-source revenue, leaving them largely dependent on external assistance for capital investments and basic service delivery.

WBG Approach

SURP-II pioneers a direct-to-municipality delivery model in one of the world’s most fragile settings. It is the only World Bank operation in Somalia implemented by city governments and using country systems. In a context where decades of conflict left sub-national government functions largely absent, the project channels infrastructure investment and institutional strengthening directly through municipal authorities, strengthening their role in service delivery, emergency coordination, and public financial management. This approach combines large-scale climate-resilient infrastructure—roads, drainage, and pedestrian networks across seven cities—with sustained capacity building in municipal finance, urban planning, and disaster preparedness, enabling local governments to progressively take ownership of urban development outcomes.

The project also adopts an integrated, multi-sectoral approach that combines large-scale infrastructure investment with institutional strengthening and emergency response capacity. A key innovation has been the use of biometric registration and cross-partner data sharing, which eliminated nearly 30,000 duplicate beneficiary records during the drought response, significantly improving accountability and aid effectiveness.