iRise Hub — Mogadishu's First Community Innovation Hub

iRise Hub opened in Mogadishu in 2017, co-founded by Awil Osman, as — according to the World Bank's Digital Development team — Somalia's first community-based innovation hub, seeded with a small grant from the World Bank's Youth Innovation Fund. It was created as an open space where Somali entrepreneurs, developers and investors could share ideas, applying the local concept of 'Ilawadaag' ('share with me') to peer feedback and collaboration.

Early activity, documented by the World Bank, included co-facilitating an innovation camp with UNDP in September 2017 and launching the hub's first structured incubation programme for local entrepreneurs in 2018. In October 2017, after a major truck bombing in Mogadishu, the hub was repurposed as an emergency call centre — a concrete, independently documented instance of civic-tech capacity being redirected to crisis response. The hub has also run the Mogadishu Watt Innovation Challenge, focused on energy solutions.

A 2026 profile reports the hub has since grown into 'a vibrant ecosystem with over 40,000 community members, 80 mentors, and 20+ innovation programs,' having organised more than 350 events and supported over 3,000 startups. These scale figures come from a single secondary source rather than an audited count, so they should be read as the hub's own reported growth rather than independently verified metrics.

Taken together, the World Bank's account of concrete, dated activities (the 2017 UNDP camp, the 2018 incubation launch, the bombing-response call centre) is the more solidly sourced part of the record; the large membership and startup-support figures reported later indicate substantial reported growth in a fragile-state setting but warrant independent confirmation.

Read the full analysis: https://www.irisehub.com/