Global evidence demonstrates that the type and quality of education can either fuel marginalization, alienation, poverty, and vulnerabilities of children and young people or strengthen societal resilience.  Quality education services that utilize multiple pathways to increase access to education equip future generations with the skills and knowledge to positively contribute to the social, political and economic development of their communities and support the realization of multiple Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

UNICEF’s focus areas enable UNICEF and its partners to provide education services for even the hardest to reach and/or marginalized children. The completion of the first ESSP 2012-2016, and the commitment of funding by GPE and the international community is an important vote of confidence for the Federal Government of Somalia’s, Education Strategic Plan.

The Education Sector Strategic Plan (ESSP 2018- 2020) is guided by the National Development Plan, The Education Act, and key education documents.

Quality education is the foundation on which a country’s development is constructed. It is also described as a tool that facilitates better living conditions for the educated individual. The idea of giving more importance to education is vital for poverty reduction. This perspective endures in the educational circles of most developing countries, with their focus on educating the masses at those lower levels. However, it is worthwhile mentioning that without an effective policy and implementation of sustainable higher education programs, the acquisition of advanced skills for national growth, technological development, and competitiveness in the global economy will remain poor. The underdevelopment in this sector becomes more of a concern to developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, which is rated the lowest in higher education enrollments in the world (Bloom, Canning, and Chan 2006,3).Contextualizing Somalia within the background of the higher education debate is complicated by many factors, including lack of effective government, prolonged devastation, irregular education systems that are various but also unaligned, and the lack of an effective regulating body that caters not only to higher education but to the entire national education program, which has been left for a long time in the hands of the private sector and some international agencies. The absence of official government sources related to national education data also contributes to the general conundrums facing Somali education, where inconsistencies exist in government capacity to cope with the effective streamlining of the education sector (Eno et al. 2014).