Experience / Case study
Three years mapping how justice actually works.
CAPABILITY
Government & Institutional Advisory · Research
CLIENT
ABA Rule of Law Initiative, under USAID's Expanding Access to Justice program
SPAN
A three-year partnership, renewed repeatedly
STATUS
Concluded · study published
THE SITUATION
Most Somalis resolve disputes outside the formal courts — through Shari'ah institutions and customary Xeer. Any serious attempt to understand justice, or legal risk, in Somalia starts from that fact.
Donors were designing justice programming worth far more than any research budget. Built on the wrong picture of who actually delivers justice — and to whom — that programming fails quietly, for years. The American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative, working with Pact under USAID's Expanding Access to Justice program, needed a research partner who could work across all three legal orders: in the field, in Somali, to publishable standards.
WHAT WE DID
The published record.
The study published as "The Shari'ah in Somalia" (2020); research into how Shari'ah is actually applied in Benadir's courts; and a Shari'a Scholars' Roundtable convened in Mogadishu (2021) — judges, advocates, university faculties and the Ulama in one structured conversation, many of them for the first time.
The field method.
Field research across urban, peri-urban, rural and displaced communities in Benadir and South West State — trained enumerators, supervision protocols, and multilingual teams working in Somali, Arabic, English and Maay. Research about how Somalis experience justice, conducted in the languages Somalis experience it in.
The finding that mattered.
For vulnerable groups — women, minority clans, at-risk youth — Shari'ah-based justice often offers stronger protection than customary Xeer. Strengthening its institutions is therefore an access-to-justice strategy, not a detour from one. Findings like that change how programmes are designed.
THE OUTCOME
The partnership renewed repeatedly across three years — the strongest endorsement research clients give. And the firm's commercial advice still runs on what it learned: when we tell a client how a dispute will actually resolve in Somalia, that advice is grounded in field evidence, not assumption.
The team — Hamza I. Abdullahi (lead) · Abdirizak Mustaf Ahmed
Statute, Shari'ah, Xeer — we didn't read about how they interact. We went and measured it.
WHY THIS MATTERS TO YOU
If you fund, design or run justice programming in Somalia — or if your commercial matter turns on how a dispute will really resolve here — you are dealing with a plural system. We are the firm that mapped it.
Discuss a research partnership