Somalia Company & Beneficial Ownership Directory

Analysis

What this data actually tells you about Somalia

Somalia is one of the world’s poorest and most aid-dependent economies, with GDP of approximately $13.0 billion in 2025 (World Bank Macro Poverty Outlook, April 2026) and GDP per capita of $665, though a separate National Bureau of Statistics-derived figure of $761-793 for 2024 conflicts with the World Bank figure, likely reflecting different population denominators, and should be treated as a genuine unresolved range rather than a single settled number. Real GDP growth slowed from 4.2% (2023) to 4.1% (2024) to an estimated 3.0% (2025), projected at 2.8% for 2026, driven mainly by sharp cuts to foreign aid, including roughly $125-183 million in affected or terminated 2025 USAID funding, and by the weak October-December 2025 Deyr rains. National inflation ran at roughly 5.1% by December 2025 on a national basis (the World Bank’s own methodology note states 2023-2024 figures were Mogadishu-only while 2025 onward reflect national data, explaining apparent inconsistency with some press figures). Somalia has no functioning modern national currency in wide daily circulation: the Somali Shilling was estimated as around 98% counterfeit in a 2017 IMF assessment, a stale but still-referenced figure, and the economy remains heavily and informally dollarized, with prices, salaries and bank balances overwhelmingly denominated in US dollars, settled mainly via mobile money. Currency reform, a new Somali Shilling backed by a full-reserve currency board arrangement, is underway under an IMF Extended Credit Facility program but had not been completed as of the sources reviewed for this content; it should not be described as already in circulation. Somalia’s debt position, by contrast, is a genuine and clean recent success story: the country reached HIPC Completion Point on December 13, 2023, securing $4.5 billion in debt-service savings and cutting external debt from 64% of GDP (2018) to under 6% at end-2023, with debt now running at roughly 8.9% of GDP (2025 estimate) and the African Development Bank separately cancelling its own Somalia loans in 2025.

Livestock exports are the backbone of Somalia’s trade economy, reaching approximately $970 million in 2024 and targeting a record $1 billion by end-2025, the eighth consecutive year of growth, shipped mainly through Bosaso and Berbera to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, Yemen and Qatar. Somalia formally joined the East African Community on March 4, 2024. The country runs a structurally enormous trade deficit, averaging nearly 60% of GDP from 2021-2024, with imports of $3.10 billion in 2024 (down from $5.30 billion in 2023); main import partners include the UAE, China, India and Turkey. Remittances, estimated at roughly $2 billion annually though estimates of their GDP share range from 18% to 25% depending on source, remain the largest source of external financing, processed mainly through hawala networks and mobile money, and the World Bank’s April 2026 outlook flags that these inflows provided an important household buffer in 2025 even as they are projected to moderate through 2026-2028. Offshore oil exploration is a real, current, but still pre-production story: Turkey’s TPAO began drilling its first exploration well in April 2026 after 2024-2025 seismic surveys, and US-based Liberty Petroleum holds production-sharing agreements signed in 2024, against government estimates of 30-40 billion barrels of potential reserves that remain unconfirmed by any proven commercial discovery.

Roughly half of Somalia’s population, 9.7 million of an estimated 19.5 million people, lived below the national poverty line as of the World Bank’s 2025 estimate (49.5%), with poverty reduction stalling after falling from 52.8% in 2023; a further 6.5 million people were estimated to face acute food insecurity in early 2026. No genuinely current, authoritative national unemployment rate was located in this research; the commonly-cited 11.4% figure dates to 2019 and should not be presented as current. Somalia’s political and security situation was still actively unfolding as of September 2026 reporting and is presented here factually rather than as a settled characterization: in March 2026, parliament approved and President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud signed constitutional amendments extending presidential and parliamentary terms from four to five years, postponing elections to 2027, a move opposition coalitions call a “constitutional coup” and which the president maintains keeps his mandate valid through 2027 while opponents argue it has expired; Puntland state rejected the amendments and, by August 2026, its forces had seized a federal government-held camp in Galkayo amid an escalating armed standoff with Mogadishu, while Jubaland separately also rejected the amendments. Al-Shabaab has retaken nearly all the territory it lost in Somalia’s 2022-2023 government offensive, advancing to within 45 kilometers of Mogadishu during a 2025 counter-offensive, with US Africa Command conducting an airstrike near Saacow in southern Somalia as recently as September 14, 2026; the African Union’s AUSSOM peacekeeping mission remains severely underfunded (roughly a quarter of its 2025 budget need was pledged), and the United States has informed the African Union it will end funding for AUSSOM’s logistics backbone beyond December 31, 2026, creating real risk of operational disruption into 2027. Counterparties should independently verify the current status of all of the above given how quickly it continued to develop through the sources reviewed for this content.