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SOMALIA LAW BLOG · I · ENTERING & OPERATING / PRACTICE NOTE
Somalia replaced its 1972 Labour Code. Your employment templates need another look.
AM
Abdirizak Mustaf Ahmed · 31 August 2026 · 7 min read
IN THIS BRIEF
Somalia's employment law changed more recently than many international employers realise. A contract that was carefully localized three years ago may now be the document that needs reviewing.
Not long ago, an international organization asked us to review the rules it used for its Somali workforce.
The organization was not trying to avoid Somali law.
Quite the opposite. It had detailed global HR policies, disciplinary procedures, employment documents and internal regulations. The problem was more ordinary: those systems had been written across several jurisdictions, at different times, by different teams. Our work was to test the Somali version against Somali labour law and make the rules usable locally. That engagement ultimately involved a detailed labour-law compliance review and a formal legal opinion.
If we carried out the same exercise today, the starting point would be different.
Somalia has replaced its old Labour Code.
That fact alone should cause international employers to reopen documents they assume were already localized.
01 — The law changed. Some websites have not.
Somalia's new Labour Code is Law No. 36 of 2024.
It was issued in December 2024. Somalia's official gazette published it in May 2025. The ILO's NATLEX database records the new Code as having entered into force in February 2025 and, importantly, as repealing the Labour Code of 1972. The federal government formally launched the revised law in Mogadishu in February 2026.
This is not a technical correction.
A large amount of English-language material on Somali employment was built around the old Code. Some of it remains online. Some template libraries still reproduce it. Some older professional memoranda inevitably do too.
That creates a peculiar risk.
The old document may look more authoritative precisely because it is detailed.
It has article numbers.
It has notice periods.
It has a table.
It may have been prepared by reputable counsel.
It can still be out of date.
The first employment-law question for a foreign employer should therefore be almost embarrassingly simple:
When was our Somalia template last legally reviewed?
If the answer predates 2025, we would reopen it.
02 — The dangerous template is the one that looks completely normal
Suppose a Nairobi-based company hires ten employees for a Mogadishu operation.
Its regional HR team starts with the Kenyan employment agreement, removes the statutory references, changes the currency to dollars, adds "Somalia" as the place of work and sends it for signature.
Nothing about the contract looks reckless.
That is why imported employment documents can be harder to diagnose than obviously bad ones.
A clause does not need to be outrageous to create a problem.
The global disciplinary policy may assume a process that does not line up cleanly with local law.
The termination provisions may reflect the old Somali statutory framework.
A leave policy may have been copied from headquarters without checking the local minimum.
A consultancy agreement may describe somebody as an independent contractor even though the actual relationship looks and operates like employment.
A confidentiality provision may be excellent, while the document says almost nothing about the mundane mechanics that become important when the relationship ends.
Employment disputes rarely begin because the parties disagreed about the beautiful clause on intellectual property.
They usually begin with ordinary facts.
What was the employee told?
Was a warning documented?
Who made the decision?
What process did the employer's own policy promise?
Was the final payment calculated correctly?
What did the contract actually say?
Where is the file?
The new Code modernizes the statutory framework across employment contracts, wages, working conditions, worker protections, occupational safety, freedom of association and dispute-resolution mechanisms.
An international company does not need to throw away its global HR system because Somalia enacted a new labour law.
It does need to know where the global system and the local law meet.
That distinction is especially important for NGOs and international organizations, because their internal rules can be more elaborate than the employment contracts themselves.
A code of conduct written in Geneva can apply in Mogadishu.
It just does not displace Somali law by being written in Geneva.
The gazette, not the template folder, decides which law governs.
03 — Employment compliance lives in the file, not only the contract
There is another reason we would resist treating this as a simple template-update exercise.
Somalia's employment relationship increasingly sits alongside other formal regulatory systems.
Foreign workers remain subject to separate Somali rules governing employment of foreign nationals; the Office of the State Attorney General lists the 2015 law on employment of foreign workers among the Ministry of Labour's legislation.
Payroll also sits inside a tax regime that changed in 2025.
The official gazette records the current Income Tax Law as Law No. 37 of 2025.
And HR systems increasingly create data-protection questions. An employee file stored in a regional platform may contain identification documents, salary information, health information, disciplinary records and other personal data. Somalia's Data Protection Authority formally began registering controllers and processors in May 2026.
So "employment compliance" can no longer mean only having a locally branded employment contract.
It is the contract.
It is the HR policy.
It is the payroll record.
It is the permit.
It is the termination file.
It is where the employee data goes.
That also changes how companies should approach a termination.
The worst time to discover a weak employment file is the afternoon the employer decides the employee must leave.
At that point, the missing warning cannot be written six months earlier.
The manager's undocumented conversations cannot be turned into contemporaneous records.
The employer cannot retroactively follow the process its own policy promised.
Good employment work is therefore unusually boring when it is done correctly.
The contract is clear.
The policies have been localized.
The manager knows what process to use.
Someone keeps the record.
The final payment can be explained.
Nothing dramatic happens.
That is the point.
04 — Reopen the documents you think are finished
The most useful employment-law action an international company operating in Somalia can take in 2026 may not be drafting anything new.
It may be pulling out the documents it already uses.
PRACTICAL CHECKLIST
When were they written?
Do they still refer, expressly or implicitly, to the 1972 framework?
Were the global HR policies reviewed against Law No. 36?
Are the foreign-worker arrangements current?
Does the payroll process reflect the 2025 tax framework?
Does employee data move outside Somalia?
A three-year-old Somalia employment agreement is not ancient.
That is precisely why people will keep using it.
But Somalia changed the law underneath it.
The dangerous template is therefore not necessarily the obviously foreign one.
It may be the carefully localized Somali template everybody stopped questioning because it worked perfectly well under the law that used to exist.
General information only. Specific employment terms and entitlements should be checked against Law No. 36 and the facts of the employment relationship.
AM
Abdirizak Mustaf Ahmed advises on employment and operating compliance and has advised the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. Hamza I. Abdullahi, a former head of the Ministry of Justice's drafting unit, tracks the Labour Code and its implementation. The Government Advisory practice →