Completed Project

The political economy of conflict and taxation in Somalia

This project has two key objectives. The first is to explore the historical legacies of weak taxation in Somalia, considering how both the colonial and post-colonial legacies of rule, governance, and statebuilding have affected the capacity of the state to collect tax and entrenched political settlements that continue to disrupt revenue potential in the contemporary period. The second is to explore how these historical legacies and the legacies of conflict have shaped the political settlements that in turn determine the realm of what is possible in terms of revenue collection in the country.

 

 

 

Researchers

Vanessa van den Boogaard

Vanessa van den Boogaard is a Senior Research Fellow at ICTD and a Senior Research Associate at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. She completed her PhD thesis on informal revenue generation and statebuilding in Sierra Leone, and has ongoing research on the topic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, and Somalia. Vanessa co-leads ICTD's research programmes on informality and gender and tax.

Najibullah Nor Isak

Najibullah Nor Isak is the Director of the Customs Department at the Ministry of Finance in Somalia. Prior to this role, he led the Tax Policy Division, where he worked on the design and implementation of key tax reforms and contributed to the resource-mobilization chapter of Somalia's National Transformation Plan 2025–2029. Moreover, he has served as a VSP Program Fellow at the World Bank Group in Washington, DC, focusing on the evaluation of Ethiopia's country programs, and has worked on research projects with the ICTD. He holds an MA in Public Finance (Tax Program) from the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) in Japan and BSc. in Economics from SIMAD University in Somalia.
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