Updated October 2026: this post was first published in March 2018 to share the brief. We have expanded it with a summary drawn from the brief itself.
Since 2015, more than 155,000 people a year on average have been evicted across Somalia, according to our March 2018 brief. Mogadishu and Baidoa were the worst affected, with thousands evicted from public and private land, and in Mogadishu more than 11,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) were being evicted every month. The single worst mass eviction came on 29 and 30 December 2017, when 38 IDP settlements within 13 kilometres of Mogadishu were destroyed. Those settlements housed 5,807 households, or 34,734 people, all but 58 households of them displaced, according to a background note by NRC, UN-Habitat and the Somalia Protection Cluster cited in the brief.
Why IDPs are evicted
The brief uses the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ definition: a forced eviction is the removal of people from their homes or land against their will, without appropriate legal or other protection. In Somalia, IDPs often settle on public land or on private plots whose ownership is contested, with no secure tenure. The rules governing evictions are underdeveloped. People who flee to areas where their clan is absent or weak lose clan protection, and minority groups face discrimination and exclusion. Eviction trends partly follow concentrations of people displaced by drought, many of whom first fled during the 2011 famine and have been displaced repeatedly since.
What evictions do to solutions
Forced evictions are both a cause and a multiplier of Somalia’s protection and displacement crises, and a main driver of secondary displacement. They interrupt reintegration and undermine collective efforts to help IDPs recover. Families lose livelihood assets and the investments they have made, and evictions bring food insecurity, malnutrition and family separation. Women and children are hit hardest, and girls and households headed by women face the greatest risk of gender-based violence.
The legal and policy gaps in 2018
Somalia acceded to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 1990, whose Article 11 and General Comment 7 set international standards on forced evictions, and Article 10 of the Provisional Constitution protects the dignity of people during evictions. But at the time of the brief, Somalia had signed but not ratified the Kampala Convention on internally displaced persons, and the Evictions Guidelines in the 2014 National Policy Framework on Displacement, developed by the Ministry of Interior, had not been ratified by parliament.
Eight recommendations
The brief calls on the Federal Government to enact and amend land laws and adopt the Forced Evictions Guidelines, consulting displaced people, line ministries and international partners, in line with the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement. The protection, camp coordination, shelter, food security and water and sanitation clusters should support the government on land administration and on protecting IDPs and returnees. Where formal courts are absent, traditional mechanisms such as xeer and Sharia law could be used, with elders and judges trained in the rights of displaced people. The government should set aside tenure-secure land for IDP settlements, and practitioners should explore a range of tenure options rather than focusing only on legal reform.
Targeting should be strengthened so that the most excluded displaced people are reached. Any lawful eviction must respect the rights of IDPs and returnees, with information in advance, full consultation on alternatives and participation throughout. And urban planning should become inclusive: displaced people taking part in planning and city extension, local planning departments strengthened, joint settlement monitoring committees set up, and IDP settlements integrated into wider urban plans.
Our later work in Somalia, including the 2019 solutions analysis update, tracked how far eviction prevention took hold in Mogadishu, Baidoa and Kismayo.
Read the full brief.
References
ReDSS (2018). Forced evictions as an obstacle to durable solutions in Somalia. Regional Durable Solutions Secretariat, March 2018. https://www.regionaldss.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Forced-evictions-as-an-obstacle-to-durable-solutions-290318-1.pdf
