Somalia beauty pageant held in the world’s worst place to be a woman

The night-time pageant in a luxury seafront hotel was a far cry from the lives of most people in Somalia, especially women.

Four million Somalis, about a quarter of the population, are living elsewhere in the country after being forced from their homes.

The UN estimates between 70% and 80% of them are women.

In 2024, enough data was collected for Somalia to be included in the United Nations Human Development Index for the first time in three decades. It came last.

Somalia is fourth from bottom on the UN’s Gender Inequality Index. Aid groups say 52% of women in the country have experienced gender-based violence. About 98% undergo female genital mutilation.

Traditionally, when a man raped a woman, his “punishment” was that he had to marry the woman who he had sexually assaulted. Attitudes towards rape and other forms of abuse against women have not changed much over the years.

In 2013, a woman in Mogadishu was sentenced to jail for one year after reporting that she had been raped by members of the security forces.

In the self-declared republic of Somaliland, religious leaders quashed a 2018 sexual offences law almost as soon as it was signed. The revised version does not protect women from child marriage, forced marriage, rape or other forms of sexual abuse.

But the fact that a Miss Somalia competition can be held in Mogadishu, even a kilometre away from a suicide bombing, shows that the country is changing both in terms of attitudes and in terms of security.

A beauty pageant would have been unthinkable a few years ago, especially when al-Shabab controlled the capital.

The crowd at Elite Hotel did not leave until the early hours of the morning. They did not hear the sound of the nearby attack as it was drowned out by the noise of the Indian Ocean waves breaking on the beach.

Kiin Hassan Fakat is a reporter with Bilan Media, an all-female news outfit in Somalia.

Mary Harper has written two books about Somalia, including Everything You Have Told Me Is True, a look at life under al-Shabab.