Kismayo, Jubaland State. 

“When it rained, water entered the stalls. Milk would spoil. Customers hesitated to come.” Hodan Yusuf Abdullahi has sold milk at Dalacada Market in Kismayo, Jubaland for years. She says this matter-of-factly, the way you describe something you have simply learned to live with.

Despite its name, it’s not just a milk market — you can buy everything here, from groceries and clothes to kitchenware and camel milk.

For the 438 women who trade here, many of them internally displaced, Dalacada is not just a market. It is a livelihood, an identity, and in many cases the single economic foothold available to them. By mid-2025, that foothold was crumbling. Cracked walls. Leaking roofing. Broken panels. Vendors worked under heat and rain with no adequate shelter, watching milk spoil and earnings fall. “It felt like our livelihoods were not valued,” says Fartun Mohamed Ahmed, another vendor.

Between November and December 2025, the market underwent comprehensive structural rehabilitation with the support of UNDP Somalia, as part of the larger Governance, Peacebuilding, Conflict Prevention and Recovery Project implemented by the Somali Women’s Studies Centre. Roofing was replaced. Walls repaired and repainted. Sanitation improved. The changes were practical. But something else shifted too.

“Now customers enter confidently,” says Ayan Hassan Nur, a trader with an IDP background. “The environment looks organised. We feel respected.” It is a small thing, perhaps, paint on a wall, a roof that holds against rain. But Halima Ahmed Sheikh, a member of the Women’s Traders’ Committee, reaches for something larger when she tries to explain it. “When your workplace is dignified,” she says, “you feel dignified. It changes how you see your business.”

That is the argument the project makes, quietly, through concrete and roofing sheets: that markets are not simply economic spaces. They are social connectors. When they function well, something steadies in the wider community around them: in households, in the daily confidence of women who might otherwise have no formal role in public life.

Across Kismayo and Luglow-Istanbul, the broader project reached more than 177,000 people through investments in infrastructure, protection, and economic recovery. The Dalacada rehabilitation is one piece of that. For the women who work here, though, it is not a data point. It is the difference between a livelihood that holds and one that does not. Hodan Yusuf Abdullahi is still selling milk. The roof, for now, is keeping the rain out.

About the Initiative

The project — Integrated Development Solutions for Internally Displaced Persons and Host Communities in Somalia— is a UNDP initiative funded through UNDP Governance, Peacebuilding, Conflict Prevention and Recovery Funding Windows. Luxembourg, Denmark and the Republic of Korea are the three Funding Windows contributors for Somalia.