Four areas, matched to the region’s four deepest challenges.
In each area our aim is the same: build something that raises the capability of the people of the region and that will still be standing, under local leadership, a generation from now. In each, we bring the best technology available, including artificial intelligence, and we publish what we learn so that government and the public can act on it.
Education
Mass education for the region’s children, in their own language, focused on the early grades where learning is decided.
Learn more →02Human Capital
Training the engineers, health workers, teachers and tradespeople the region needs, tied to the employers who will hire them.
Learn more →03Agriculture
Upskilling the farmer and the pastoralist so that productivity rises and a single drought no longer destroys a family’s wealth.
Learn more →04Economic Empowerment
Stimulating private capital and entrepreneurship, structured in keeping with the community’s values.
Learn more →Three principles run through everything.
We do what works
We fund approaches with a record of results in settings like ours, and we measure our own work against an independent baseline before we scale it. Enthusiasm is not evidence.
We seed innovation, and we create it
Where a proven tool exists, we bring it to the region. Where none exists for Somali speakers, pastoralists or dryland farmers, we build it ourselves and give it away.
We work with government, not around it
SEED cannot stand in for a ministry of education or an agriculture bureau, and does not try to. Our role is to be a useful partner: to test better methods at a scale that can be measured, and to offer what succeeds to the public institutions that can carry it across the region.