When the Ground Keeps Shifting- What a fragile economy needs while the world talks about stability

By Kahiye Alim

A herder loses half his flock to a long dry season. A trader in the city pays more for every container that arrives late. A young woman finishes school and finds no firm ready to hire her. These are not separate stories. They are the same economy under pressure from different directions.

Around the world, the language of recovery is familiar: growth, jobs, stability, cooperation. Yet the ground keeps shifting. Climate shocks arrive faster. Trade routes become unpredictable. Debt loads limit what governments can spend. New technologies promise gains for some and disruption for others. For countries that are already fragile, the space to respond keeps narrowing.

The weather is now an economic fact

In Somalia, drought and flood are no longer only environmental events. They cut livestock sales, raise food prices, push families into overcrowded towns and strain the little formal employment that exists. When the rains fail, public revenue falls and social needs rise at the same time.

Treating climate only as an environmental file therefore misses the point. It is a direct risk to household income, to the budget, and to social calm. Any serious plan for economic resilience has to treat climate finance and climate adaptation as core economic policy, not as a side project.

The firms that actually employ people

Most jobs in Somalia sit in small and medium businesses — shops, transport, light processing, services. These firms rarely appear in big investment conferences. They need simpler things: working capital, fair rules, basic skills, and a chance to sell to government and larger buyers without being shut out.

When credit is scarce and competition is uneven, these businesses stay small or informal. The result is fewer steady jobs and weaker local demand. Strengthening them is not a soft social goal. It is one of the few realistic ways to expand employment without waiting for large foreign projects that may never come.

Capital that stays away

Private money is often described as the missing piece. In practice it stays away for a clear reason: standard risk models treat fragile settings as almost uninvestable. Projects that could work on the ground are priced as if they will fail.

Until risk is shared more intelligently — through guarantees, blended structures, or local partners who already operate successfully — the gap between available global capital and usable local investment will remain. Public budgets alone cannot fill it.

What can still be built at home

No external meeting will replace the hard domestic work: collecting more revenue fairly, spending it transparently, choosing public investments that actually raise productivity, and protecting the spending that keeps households from falling further in a crisis.

At the same time, no country absorbs shocks alone. Regional trade links, shared infrastructure and more than one route to market reduce the damage when a single partner or a single commodity fails. Integration is not a slogan. It is a practical form of insurance.

One problem, not four

It is tempting to treat climate, private investment, small business, debt and regional ties as separate agendas. They are not. They are different faces of the same task: building an economy that can take a hit and still offer people a chance to earn, trade and plan.

The herder, the trader and the graduate do not experience these issues as policy categories. They experience them as empty water points, higher prices, and closed doors. The test of any strategy is whether it narrows those daily pressures.

The global conversation will continue to speak of stability and growth. For places that live with repeated shocks, the more useful question is simpler: what can be made more durable this year, with the tools that are actually within reach?

Kahiye Alim

Email: [email protected]

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Kahiye Alim is CEO of Dalka Capital and an international lawyer.