Shaqodoon

Who We Are

Shaqodoon is a local NGO founded in 2011 to create innovative and long-lasting solutions to Somalia/land’s youth employment challenges. The NGO is the upshot of the former EDC Somali livelihood project funded by USAID that provided youth in Somaliland, Puntland and South-Central Somalia with greater opportunities to access to work, training, internships, and self-employment opportunities. The organization designs, delivers, and evaluates innovative programs to address some of the local community’s most urgent challenges in livelihood skill training, education, and health.

Shaqodoon is a national platform whose goal is to prioritize youth employment and education on the development agenda and to exchange knowledge on effective policies and programs to improve employment and education opportunities for youth, prioritizing at-risk youth, marginalized groups, and people who have lost hope and are thus often jailed for local crimes. Shaqodoon Organization is a service provider dedicated to skill development, employment services, youth entrepreneurship, private sector business development, and technology for development. Shaqodoon makes use of participatory methods to ensure youth participate in delivering its services.

What We Do

We are here not for income, but for outcome

Shaqodoon serves the Somali youth in general and the most vulnerable and impoverished among them in particular. Our program reaches unemployed university graduates, aspiring entrepreneurs and early-stage start-ups, unprivileged and private sector development. The areas we operate in are several and varied. In particular, Shaqodoon organization operates with:

Entrepreneurship

We empower young people to succeed in self-employment because we know that the existing job market can’t absorb the vast number of young people entering every year from universities. We use the Build Your Business (BYB) model to provide young people with a highly engaging digital tool for learning practical skills to start their own businesses.BYB is designed to empower aspiring young entrepreneurs by introducing them to the basic principles needed to successfully launch, lead, and scale up their micro-enterprises. Most importantly, we link these aspiring entrepreneurs to financial institutions. In improving our youth support programs, this year, we are planning to launch a Youth Innovation Fund” along with HarHub’s launch; this fund will be dedicated exclusively to nurturing young talent and aspiring entrepreneurs in Somaliland.

Employment

Every year Shaqodoon offers programs for youth resulting in employment and skill development for thousands of university undergraduates and other youth aged15 to 35. We offer highly modernized skill development programs. These programs involve the development of practical, hands-on skills, enhanced through short-term vocational training that lasts3-6 months, by our specialized academies such as HargaBits Academy, vet center, etc. Unlike traditional vocational education, our programs focus on the current needs of urban youth, such as digital skills, design skills, filmmaking, and entrepreneurship. Additionally, we offer youth work readiness services that increase their chance of securing gainful employment. Most importantly, our holistic approach to youth employment focuses on setting up internship centers at universities that create a bridge to full-time employment for talented undergraduates. Shaqodoon helped more than 2,000 youth to secure internships last year; the majority of these youth went on to secure employment. Shaqodoon’s youth employment programs also address the need of marginalized youth who are living in slums and those facing gender-based discrimination.

Business development

We play a vital role in addressing business challenges in Somaliland and help companies and small businesses by advising on the most suitable opportunities to follow after eliminating several alternatives through detailed mapping of their products, services, technology, business plans, and their planned business sector. Moreover, we offer multiple options and solutions for companies, small businesses, and start-ups to transform potential opportunities into viable revenue streams through need and capacity assessments and tailored needs-based training and coaching. In 2017, Shaqodoon supported and expanded more than 78 startups and 1,300 existing businesses.

Technology and Innovation

Technological advances are a driving force for development. Access to information and communication technology is growing rapidly and is changing the lives of people in developing countries. Shaqodoon promotes the use of innovative applications of technology in education, elections, livelihood planning, job matching, vocational training, governance, community development, youth employment, resilience, business development, entrepreneurship, and other areas.

On a broader level, Shaqodoon focuses on helping international organizations, humanitarian organizations, local companies, and NGOs maximize impact. Our approach focuses on aspiring entrepreneurs, empowering them with the skills to create and sustain appropriate technology solutions. For example, we introduced the use of crowdfunding platforms to allow entrepreneurs to drive the financing of their startups. Among the services we offer in this category are mobile-based feedback mechanisms, crowdfunding platforms, voice-based SMS, interactive market information systems, live monitoring, SMS tracker, and custom applications.