In Mogadishu this April, 52 government officials, labour leaders, employers, and civil society advocates gathered for two days to chart a new course for Somalia's migrant workers—one of the first coordinated efforts to bring a landmark labour migration policy from the cabinet table to real implementation on the ground.
Somalia sits at the crossroads of one of the world's largest migration crises. An estimated 685,198 Somali refugees live primarily in Kenya and Ethiopia, while approximately 169,000 Somali migrants in irregular situations are deported back to the country each year, predominantly from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Kenya. Many face exploitation, unsafe working conditions, and wage theft along every step of their journey. For a nation stretched by decades of conflict and fragile governance, the stakes of getting migration policy right are enormous—not just for the hundreds of thousands Somali nationals working abroad, but for the country's ability to build functioning labour markets and protect its citizens' dignity.
The workshop, held 26–27 April 2026, was organized by the International Labour Organization's Better Regional Migration Management Programme, funded by the United Kingdom's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, in partnership with Somalia's Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. It brought together an unusually broad coalition: representatives from multiple federal government institutions, the ILO and International Organization for Migration, the Federation of Somali Trade Unions, the Somali Chamber of Commerce and Industry, private employment agencies, civil society organizations, and Somali National University. The gathering was small but deliberate—40 men and 12 women tasked with understanding two newly adopted frameworks that could transform how Somalia manages labour migration.
Those frameworks represent years of groundwork. In 2021, Somalia's government ratified three key International Labour Organization conventions on migrant worker protection and employment agency regulation. Building on extensive consultations with government, unions, employers, and community partners, the Cabinet formally endorsed the National Labour Migration Policy in July 2025, followed by the Private Employment Agencies Regulations in August 2025. These aren't symbolic documents—they establish standards for safe, regular labour migration while explicitly safeguarding the rights of women migrants and persons with disabilities, populations especially vulnerable to abuse.
The Mogadishu workshop wasn't a celebration but a working session. Participants moved through presentations on both frameworks, discussing implementation processes and the specific roles each institution would need to play. They split into working groups to tackle the hardest part: turning policy into practice. By the end of the two days, they had jointly drafted implementation roadmaps that spelled out who does what, and aligned their commitments with international labour standards.
This wasn't Somalia's first push on the issue. Between January and March 2026, a series of earlier sensitization workshops had already engaged 139 participants across four states, including leaders and members of the Federation of Somali Trade Unions. But the Mogadishu gathering represented the federal level's moment to align around shared responsibility. As Minister of Labour and Social Affairs Prof. Salim Alio Ibro stated, the frameworks are "officially approved and ready for implementation," but only if "strong collaboration among government institutions and social partners" takes hold. That collaboration, still fragile and new, is what the April workshop aimed to cement—and what will determine whether Somalia's migrant workers actually see their rights protected or whether these policies, like many before, fade into filing cabinets.