Kismayo Is Separating Primary and Secondary Schools. The Direction Is Right — the Follow-Through Is Everything

The revival of Somalia's education system after the collapse did not begin with state controlled education system. It began with the few Somali educators who stayed, and the private communities who organized around them in Mogadishu, Kismayo, and Somalia's other major cities. When there was no state left to build a system, they built one anyway — one classroom, one enrolled child at a time. Out of that effort came umbrella associations: FPENS, SAFE, SOFE — schools joining schools, because if no one above them was going to set a standard, they would set it themselves. Unified exams. Shared certification. Sometimes even a shared curriculum, stitched together by people running schools out of whatever building still had a roof.

Understand where this started. When the state collapsed in 1991, Somalia's education system didn't rebuild along anyone's plan. It rebuilt along whoever showed up. Some schools took over old government buildings. Others built from nothing, in private homes, in compounds, in whatever space could hold a blackboard and rows of children. And the curriculum? Borrowed. Kenyan in one school, Emirati in another, Saudi in a third — whatever a school could get its hands on, whatever a teacher happened to know. Nobody was asking whether primary and secondary belonged in separate buildings. The question was simpler, and more urgent: how do we get more Somali children into any building at all so that they are educated?

I want to be clear about something. Those circumstances were harsh. Unregulated. Nothing like a standardized system anywhere else in the world would recognize. But the people who built it anyway — the ones who opened a school with no state behind them, no funding, no guarantee it would survive the year — they deserve applause, not criticism. They kept a generation of Somali children learning when the state gave them nothing to learn with.

Formalization came slowly. Painfully slowly. It took until 2015 — twenty-four years after the collapse — for southern Somalia to hold a centralized national exam. One exam. One standard. Applied across schools that had spent two decades answering to no one but themselves. We were happy. Genuinely happy. But happiness did not mean certainty. Many schools kept examining their students twice for a while — once for the national exam, and once for their own umbrella, the way they always had — unsure whether this new centralized system would actually hold. They ran both exams in parallel, waiting until they were sure enough to confide fully in the government's exam alone. Only then did the parallel testing fall away. A decade later, the centralized exam is still standing. That, on its own, is worth remembering.

Which brings me to how most of these schools actually organized themselves once they existed. In Kismayo — and I'd guess in most of Somalia — the answer was the 8-4 system. Eight years of primary, four years of secondary, one campus, one gate, one administration running both. It made sense. It saved money schools didn't have. It kept a fragile institution alive one more year. Whatever its shortcomings, it was enabling. It let schools survive.

But survival has a cost, and this one is worth sitting with. Combine an eight-year-old and an eighteen-year-old on the same campus, and you get overcrowding that no building was designed to hold. You get safety risks for the smallest children, sharing a gate, a yard, and often inadequate sanitation, with teenagers twice their size. You get resources stretched thin enough that a single teacher is expected to shift from early childhood pedagogy in one period to adolescent teaching in the next, as if those are the same skill taught at different volumes. They are not. And you get what happens whenever young children and teenagers share the same playground and the same halls: bullying, intimidation, the kind of fear a six-year-old carries home and never quite explains to their parents. That is for real. Anyone who has spent real time in these schools has seen it.

There is a reason school systems elsewhere keep young children and teenagers apart, and it isn't bureaucracy for its own sake. A six-year-old and a sixteen-year-old need different rooms, different rhythms, different adults trained for entirely different jobs. One needs a slower pace, a gentler space, a room built around play and first letters. The other needs labs, workshops, teachers who can push them toward something closer to independence. Put both under one roof for long enough, and you are not saving money. You are asking one system to do two jobs badly instead of one job well.

So when Jubaland's Ministry of Education announced it is separating primary and secondary schools — and Kismayo, as far as I can tell, may be the first district in southern Somalia to formally embark on this — I welcome it. Without reservation. This is not a small administrative shuffle. It is the next real step in a formalization process that started with school owners organizing themselves, continued through a centralized exam in 2015, and now, finally, reaches into how the schools themselves are built.

But I want to be cautious here, because welcoming a decision and trusting its execution are two different things. This change requires more than a declaration. It requires close supervision, sustained well past the announcement. It requires real support for school administrations that have run combined campuses for twenty years and are now being asked to run something else entirely. It requires training for secondary teachers who may have spent their whole career adjusting lessons for two age groups at once and have never had to specialize. It requires facilities — labs, workshops, the physical space that practical, hands-on classes actually need, not just a schedule that says they exist.

And it requires paying teachers for the weight of what they are now carrying. If the ministry is asking secondary teachers to do more, teachers need to see that reflected in what they take home — not as a favor, but as the cost of the reform actually working.

Then there are the families. This is the part I don't think gets said enough. Parents who send their children to a combined school didn't just choose a building — they chose people. A headmaster they trust. Teachers who know their child's name. Sometimes a discount, quietly given, because the school knew the family and the family had more than one child enrolled. Now, schools that used to carry a child from first grade through secondary are being demoted to primary only. And when that child finishes primary, the choice their parents already made — the one built on trust, on years, on relationship — disappears. Their children will be compelled to attend schools they don't know, sometimes far from where they live. That is not a footnote to this policy. It is one of its costs, and it deserves support, not silence.

So here is where I land. The direction is right. It has been right since the day school owners first decided, with no one telling them to, that Somali children deserved a real standard. It was right in 2015, when a centralized exam finally arrived. And it is right now, in Kismayo, as primary and secondary finally separate. What has never been guaranteed — not once, in three decades — is the follow-through. That is what I am watching for. Not the announcement. What comes after it.