Türkiye is a front-runner in investments in Somalia, said the chief economic adviser to the African country’s president.
“The international community has been providing support to Somalia, the World Bank, the IMF, and bilateral countries … Türkiye is one of those countries,” Hassan Adam Hosow, also executive director of the National Economic Council, told Anadolu.
Somalia is an investment destination rather than a country that needs to be helped in terms of aid, and Türkiye has made investments in its infrastructure, airports, seaports, and many social sectors, he said.
He added that Türkiye’s state-run participation lender Ziraat Bank is now open in Somalia, so Türkiye now has the first mover advantage.
Debt relief
Somalia’s economy has been growing since it started its recovery in 2012, and for the past two years it grew by an average of 4 percent – a higher-than-average growth rate in most countries – and the country has achieved multiple milestones for the past three years, starting with debt relief in 2023, he said.
The private sector has been booming for a while, and the service sector is really leading economic growth, and the country has developed in areas where it can develop, he noted.
Hosow said Somalia developed a national transformation plan to guide its development trajectory in the next five years, and it also designed and developed the Centennial Vision 2060 that will guide Somalia’s long-term development from now till the 100th anniversary of its independence, gained in 1960.
“That vision would see Somalia as a developed, prosperous, and peaceful country, with citizens that have around $7,000 annual per capita income, which would put us in the upper middle country status,” he said.
Somalia was able to achieve debt relief in 2023 with efforts by President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who started debt relief in his first term and completed this in his second, Hosow said.
So debt went from 64 percent of the country’s GDP to 6 percent now, a manageable figure, he underlined.
