Dear Somalia,

You have done what many said could not be done: you cleared your debts. On 13 December 2023 the boards of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank’s International Development Association approved your completion point under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative. Your external public debt fell from $5.3 billion at the end of 2018, 64 percent of your economy, to $0.6 billion at the end of 2023, less than 6 percent.

The World Bank is financing electricity sector recovery and clean energy access, a shock-responsive safety net, the Damal Caafimaad health project, urban resilience, and Barwaaqo, a project for water and rural resilience. With debt relief, Somalia can now borrow on concessional terms to build, rather than only to recover.

The work ahead is plain, and it is worth saying plainly. Only five in every hundred of you cook with clean fuel. Only sixteen in every hundred of you have a safely managed toilet at home. Essential health care scores 30 out of 100 on the World Health Organization index. Clean energy sets your Coverage today, at 5 out of 100, with shelter and health care close behind. Each of them is within your reach.

A clean ledger is a new asset. It can carry finance aimed at food, water and care, the guarantees still furthest from your people’s reach, and it can be kept clean if every new loan is tied to an outcome a citizen can feel.

Now imagine that same resolve turned toward every home in the country. Picture Perfect Somalia: a morning when every family cooks with clean fuel and sits down to a full table; when every tap runs clean and every home has a safe toilet; when every child walks to a school where a teacher is waiting, and reads with ease by the age of ten; when every mother lives within reach of a clinic with the lights on, and every young person finds work that pays. And no Somali falls below a decent life, because the nation has decided that none will.

“You cleared a debt the world thought permanent. Now clear the Seven Human Guarantees, one at a time.”

So this is an invitation. Bring your vision, your story and your solutions to the Perfect Somalia Design Studio, and join the Co-designers who are already imagining what comes next. Perfect Somalia will not be designed for you. It will be designed by you.