Somali American's Are the Most Self-Reliant Group in America: Highest Performance in the Self-Support Index in Minnesota at 84%

[Idilinaa]

Love to hear our people doing well. The question is why is the data on Somalis so contradictory? We need our own statistics organization to get proper data on both the diaspora and Somalia as a whole.

The economist Vali Jamal, in the late 1980s, was the first, as far as I’m aware, to notice that much of the data produced about Somalis was inaccurate. It didn’t reflect economic realities on the ground and often contradicted background data.

This is because Somalis are organized economically in an unconventional way, which renders many macroeconomic indicators misleading. We are a trade based society, with goods, people, services, and money moving across borders. Our economic organization is cooperative, and there are no clear-cut divisions along occupational lines, most families are multi-occupational.

Jamal also found that Somalis typically have multiple supplementary income sources beyond their salaries. These may come from trade, service activities, small businesses funded from personal savings, or secondary employment. They would even share income across diverse and sporadic sources among family, relatives or friends. So they had supplemental wage or non-wage incomes that allowed them to enjoy higher expenditures.

I completely agree, while most societies have specialized institutions for collecting economic data, Somalis need to build our own tools and methods to gather data that accurately reflects our societal dynamics. We cannot simply borrow approaches from other countries and assume they apply to us.