Somaliland: UAE built the port. Diaspora writes the checks. Now Israel and Taiwan want in.
Jim Stenman
Seven months on from recognition, the focus is pivoting from aid to hard investment. Here is what that actually looks like on the ground.
This is a bonus edition of Horn Horizons, part of the Global Power Shifts network, where I track Power, Ports, and Prosperity across the Horn and the Red Sea.
Somaliland is the closest thing the Horn has to a live experiment. A state recognized by only one country is trying to turn a Gulf-grade port and diaspora savings into a real economy. Israel and Taiwan test the edges, while the wider neighborhood watches what a single recognition unlocks.
The open question is whether any serious capital beyond the diaspora’s own actually shows up. To find out who’s buying, and where the pitch runs ahead of the plumbing beneath it, I sat down with Hana Kaise Abdi, founding partner of Bilow Capital , who guides foreign investors into Somaliland on the ground in Hargeisa.
Israel became the first and so far only country to recognize Somaliland in December last year, over objections from the African Union, the Arab League and, loudest of all, Mogadishu. A state recognized by just one country can’t borrow on international markets or draw on the development banks, so the capital that builds Somaliland arrives as investment, not debt, and most of it comes via the diaspora.
Remittances to Somalia as a whole, Somaliland included, run around $3 billion a year, much of it into land, property and businesses, and seven months on that hasn’t shifted. DP World is expanding its Berbera port terminal and the dismantling of USAID under the Trump administration has pushed donors to talk investment where they once focused on grants, but the buyer writing the checks is still overwhelmingly Somaliland’s own.
Hana wants to widen that pool. British-born, raised in Bristol by parents who fled the civil war, she moved to Hargeisa about seven years ago and co-founded Bilow Capital, which walks foreign investors through market research and due diligence, runs an accelerator, the Bilow Venture Lab, and since February has deployed a diaspora-backed fund, the Rise Fund, into startups that complete the cohort.
“The private sector’s the real route for sustainable development,” she tells me, a conviction that hardened as she watched the 2017 famine from the UK. She’s paid on the investment flow she describes, which is reason enough to hear her out and to read the numbers with that interest attached.
Recognition moved faster than the money
The harder assets moved earlier. DP World has run Berbera since 2017 and is building it toward a 2 million-container capacity, with a direct Jebel Ali service launched some eight months ago, and Hana treats the port as proof of concept — “a great symbol for what can be achieved if more foreign investors came in.”What the port mostly ships is the economy’s mainstay: live sheep and goats bound for Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, which made up about two-thirds of exports in 2024 and peak each year around Hajj time. Much of the investment case is a bet on diversifying away from that single artery.
The politics that dominate the headlines have, so far, left that balance sheet alone, which is the part that matters for anyone pricing exposure. Somalia’s annulment of its agreements with the UAE in January landed on federal Somalia and Abu Dhabi’s bases there, not on Berbera, and Hana reports no measurable effect on Somaliland itself. The 2024 memorandum meant to grant Ethiopia sea access for a step toward recognition is effectively frozen, and she doesn’t oversell it, calling Ethiopian investment interest “a matter of time” rather than a live pipeline.
Where she sees the newest interest is Taiwan, the Gulf, and Israel:
- Taiwan: A natural counterpart — a self-governing island much of the world declines to call a country, for fear of provoking Beijing, yet trades with anyway. It moved earliest in hard assets, years before recognition was on the table: in 2021 Taiwan’s state oil company, CPC, took a 49% stake in a Somaliland exploration block, SL10B/13, operated by the British-Turkish firm Genel Energy, whose Toosan-1 prospect is estimated at up to 650 million barrels. Nothing’s out of the ground yet. The block’s still at the exploration stage, with no commercial well drilled, and Genel has been seeking a licence extension that would push a first drilling deadline toward 2027, even as its Taiwanese partner presses to move faster. Other Taiwanese firms are active in mining, fisheries, and agriculture.
- The Gulf: Runs UAE-first, with Saudi money as the natural extension of that livestock trade.
- Israel: The freshest and the least monetized. The areas she flags are agriculture and water (desalination and irrigation, where Israeli firms lead), technology, digital health, and health care, alongside a Red Sea security logic that’s really about the view it buys: Berbera sits across the water from Yemen, a vantage point on the Houthis and the Bab el-Mandeb chokepoint. “Very early days,” Hana said. That stretch of water’s stayed in the headlines, with the Iran-aligned Houthis recently attacking two Saudi oil tankers about 70 nautical miles southwest of Al Shuqaiq, near the strait.
The interview
Edited for length and clarity. The figures are hers unless attributed otherwise.
Q: Who’s actually putting money in?
Hana: The biggest chunk is the diaspora, without question. There’s remittance of roughly $3 billion, and while a lot of that’s consumption, a large amount goes into investment. There isn’t hard data I can point you to, but I’m diaspora, as is my whole extended family, and you can see it: a lot of the real estate is diaspora-owned, a lot of land, a lot of businesses.
Beyond that, there are two types of clients I work with. One is private-sector investors looking for market-rate returns, interested in fisheries, agriculture, mining, manufacturing, usually businesses from the Middle East or high-net-worth individuals. The other is development agencies trying to move away from the aid model into an investment model, who want to put money into things like the venture lab and the fund.
Her $3 billion figure’s worth a footnote. Remittances on that order are the standard estimate for Somalia as a whole, not Somaliland alone, and the investment share of it isn’t separately documented, a caveat she volunteers herself. Read it as direction, not measurement.
Q: What do your founders actually lack?
Hana: Capital, of course, is the first thing. But it goes beyond that. A lot of founders have brilliant ideas, and sometimes even the savings to start, but no procedures in place: financial management, operations, human resources, talent retention.
And formalization. One founder we worked with had a strong business and co-founders, but nothing was legalized or formalized, and it ended with him not being able to raise investment because of that. Moving from the informal to the formal economy is a huge missing link. Then working capital, because a lot of small businesses have no access to finance at all. And regulation, where the government hasn’t yet built an environment suited to small and medium businesses.
Q: Why the emphasis on women founders specifically?
Hana: There are a substantial number of female business owners, but they’re underrepresented and they don’t get the same opportunities. A lot of them don’t see themselves applying for something like an accelerator. They feel they might be excluded from it. So we push to bring the existing female founders through the cohorts, so they’re not left behind and get the same access to finance. It also gives them independence in their own lives and the ability to make a living themselves.
Q: For a non-diaspora investor, what about the legal framework? You’re, on paper, part of Somalia.
Hana: In practice, Somalia doesn’t regulate anything inside Somaliland, not the legal system, not the economy, definitely not the politics. Most investors just register their business here. If you go through the correct legal channels and the business or asset is in your name, and a dispute occurs with a partner on the ground, it’s very difficult to lose that case in the courts.
Some investors also choose to execute their contracts in the UAE or the UK. Either way it’s workable. The biggest misconception is how safe and how easy it actually is. As someone who’s traveled all over, Somaliland’s one of the safest places I’ve been
She’s talking about physical security, not investment risk, and there the UK Foreign Office is more cautious than she is; more on that below.
Her numbers, and the wider picture
Bilow doesn’t yet have an audited track record, and Hana’s candid that it’s early. In under a year, the venture lab has run two cohorts with about 46% female participation. Since launching the fund in February the firm has invested in 10 businesses, and seen more than 80% of participants qualify for investment after the program. One founder, she said, raised more than $200,000 in a single round, and others have opened second branches in Hargeisa or been approached directly by investors. The Rise Fund is structured as an open-ended, evergreen vehicle and began deploying immediately rather than waiting for a first close, which it hasn’t yet reached.
These are the firm’s own figures, from a party raising capital on the strength of them and with no independent registry to test them against, so read them as a founder’s self-report, not a verified return. What can be checked is the opportunity she points to, and the public record broadly supports her framing:
- Fisheries: Her claim that the fisheries are barely exploited holds up: sector assessments put under 10% of stocks worked on a Gulf of Aden coast that ranks among East Africa’s richer fishing grounds.
- Manufacturing: Her pitch rests on the country importing more than 90% of what it consumes, which she frames as room for import substitution rather than a solved problem.
- Legal comfort: Real on paper, as Somaliland’s investment law grants foreign investors national treatment, a three-year tax holiday, and import-tax exemptions on equipment.
What the pitch leaves out
The formalization trap Hana cautions against is also the market’s central risk. When a viable business misses out simply because its founders never put proper contracts in place, the constraint isn’t a lack of ideas, but the fragile foundation beneath it. No accelerator program can substitute for commercial law, functional courts, or a regulator built to support small business. It’s the exact same gap a foreign investor inherits.
Recognition sits on the same ledger. Somaliland’s record of stability and peaceful transfers is real, and the safety case Hana makes is strong on its own terms, but the same non-recognition that shuts out sovereign debt also shuts out the political-risk insurance and development-finance guarantees that de-risk large projects, which is why what moves is still mostly diaspora equity and word of mouth. Her own workaround, registering locally but signing contracts under UAE or UK law, is a rational hedge and an admission of what the domestic framework can’t yet guarantee.
And she’s describing day-to-day Hargeisa, not the whole risk picture: the UK Foreign Office still advises against all but essential travel to Somaliland, and Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi declared in a televised address, days after recognition, that any Israeli presence in Somaliland would be treated as “a military target” (Times of Israel). A serious investor prices the corridor, not the city alone.
Somaliland’s story has moved faster than its balance sheet. Recognition, a Gulf-grade port, and the dismantling of USAID driven by Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE have made ‘investment, not aid’ the language everyone in Hargeisa now speaks, and Hana’s fluent in it because she’s been making that argument since before it was fashionable. But the buyers are still overwhelmingly the diaspora, because that’s most of what a largely unrecognized state has to work with, and Israeli recognition isn’t yet a financing system.
That’s also why the founders she works with keep being held back by the same unglamorous things: lack of paperwork, working capital, and basic regulation. The pitch works on paper, but the legal and regulatory rails beneath it remain fragile. I’d watch whether the aid-to-investment pivot converts into deployed private capital, and whether government policy catches up with the headlines by building the legal and banking infrastructure small businesses actually need.
The bottom line
So, who wants to invest in Somaliland? For now, the people who already believe in it.
- The diaspora: Writes these checks because it’s personally invested in seeing Somaliland thrive, beyond the returns.
- Israel: Has named its interests but not yet its money.
- Taiwan: Has paid for an oil block it still has to drill.
- The Gulf: Already the anchor customer, taking the live sheep and goats that remain the economy’s mainstay. For Abu Dhabi, Berbera is the template for doing business with an unrecognized state, feeding its wider ports strategy across Africa.
- Ethiopia: Berbera offers the landlocked country sea access, a huge priority for Addis, and a way to diversify away from Djibouti, through which some 95% of its trade travels. DP World signed a 2021 memorandum of understanding with Addis to invest up to $1 billion in the Berbera-Ethiopia trade corridor, though where that agreement stands today is an open question.
The next twelve months will show which of those turns into deployed capital.
