The Financing Accelerator Network for NCDs (FAN) has awarded its second seed funding grant, to support the establishment of Somalia’s first noncommunicable disease (NCD) registries—marking a foundational step toward evidence-based planning and financing for NCDs in the country.
The FAN Fund provides catalytic seed funding for country-led initiatives that translate learning into practical, financing-oriented projects. Its focus is on strengthening policymaking, enabling innovative financing approaches, expanding existing programs, and laying the groundwork for broader scale-up.
For decades, decision makers in Somalia have been required to plan, budget, and prioritize NCD services in the absence of routine, reliable data—a constraint that has contributed to the limited visibility of NCDs in policy and budgeting processes. This challenge is particularly acute in fragile and crisis-affected contexts, where competing demands on public resources are high.
The grant will support the introduction of a coordinated, multi-disease registry model designed to operate within existing national health information systems and align with budgeting processes in both the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Finance, enabling a shift towards locally generated evidence.
“This is a groundbreaking step toward building the evidence we simply have not had in the past,” said Hamdi Osman, Head of National NCD Program section, Ministry of Health, Somalia. “Support from the FAN Fund will help close the gap between data and financing. Generating reliable, robust information will strengthen how we plan, budget, and deliver quality NCD services—while laying the foundation for a system that can be scaled nationally and adapted for other fragile settings in the region.”
Over a 12-month period, the Federal Ministry of Health, working with implementing partner Hope Base Advisory, will establish and formalize regional NCD registry teams in Southwest State and the Banadir Region, set up manual registries in three health facilities, and train 15 registry officers to collect high-quality data on cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and chronic respiratory conditions. For the first time, this data will be consolidated into Somalia’s first NCD Statistics and Investment Report and will feed directly into NCD statistics tables, fiscal space analysis, and costed investment briefs to support budget hearings, universal health coverage benefits package design, and domestic and external resource mobilization.
“This initiative in Somalia establishes a critical foundation for making NCDs visible within national planning and budgeting processes—where they have historically been underrepresented,” said Dr. Jackson Otieno, Senior Research and Policy Analyst at AFIDEP, host of FAN’s regional NCD Financing Accelerator in Sub-Saharan Africa. “By embedding data generation within existing systems and linking it directly to investment decisions, the project positions Somalia to move from estimates toward a more systematic, evidence-informed approach to addressing NCDs over time.”