An organization built for one region, to work with it on its hardest problems.
SEED is headquartered in Jigjiga and works exclusively in the Somali Regional State of Ethiopia, in partnership with its government, its elders and its communities.
The Somali Region of Ethiopia is home to roughly six million people. It has a young population, a long tradition of trade, deep ties to the Gulf and to Somali communities around the world, and some of the largest rangelands in the Horn of Africa. It also has the lowest school completion, the lowest literacy, the thinnest professional class and some of the highest poverty in the country.
Those two facts sit side by side. The region has come a long way: primary enrollment, below 10 percent in 1991, is now close to universal, and the regional government has made raising the quality of education and the resilience of pastoral livelihoods a declared priority. But the scale of what remains is larger than any single institution, public or private, can carry alone. Children enrolled who do not yet learn to read, graduates without the skills employers need, herders one failed rain away from losing everything, traders with no path to capital: these are problems that call for patient, locally rooted partners who stay.
SEED takes a long view, measured in generations rather than project cycles, and concentrates on four areas where the gaps are widest and the returns to getting it right are largest: education, human capital, agriculture and economic empowerment.
SEED invests in the people of Ethiopia’s Somali Region: in quality education for every child, in the skills of farmers, pastoralists and professionals, and in the private enterprise that creates lasting prosperity.
A Somali Region where every person can read, learn and contribute; where farmers, pastoralists and entrepreneurs prosper; and where a skilled generation leads the region’s economic and cultural life.
Three principles run through everything.
We do what works
We fund approaches with a record of results in settings like ours, and we measure our own work against an independent baseline before we scale it. Enthusiasm is not evidence.
We seed innovation, and we create it
Where a proven tool exists, we bring it to the region. Where none exists for Somali speakers, pastoralists or dryland farmers, we build it ourselves and give it away.
We work with government, not around it
SEED cannot stand in for a ministry of education or an agriculture bureau, and does not try to. Our role is to be a useful partner: to test better methods at a scale that can be measured, and to offer what succeeds to the public institutions that can carry it across the region.