Fadumo Dayib was once a Somali refugee. A Harvard graduate and mother, she now lives a comfortable life in Finland. Despite the overwhelming odds, she running as Somalia’s first female president.
Fadumo Dayib is trying to do something no one has ever done before. Despite overwhelming odds, she is vying to become Somalia’s first female president. Those long odds have a lot to do with her own story. She has been a refugee for most of her life. Despite not learning how to read until she was 14 years old, she now has a master’s degree from Harvard in public administration and is working on a Ph.D. But in a country with a dismal human rights record and a long history of oppression against women, running for the highest public office in the land comes with risks. Fadumo Dayib joins me now. Welcome to the program.
FADUMO DAYIB: Thank you very much, Rachel.
MARTIN: Why do you want to do this?
DAYIB: Because I see what I’m doing as a moral obligation and a civic duty towards my country. I’ve watched for almost 26 years, hoping for a competent leadership to come that can bring us all back. There’s 1.5 million Somalis in the diaspora, 1.2 million internally displaced inside the country. And they’re all yearning to have a dignified existence to go back.
MARTIN: What is life like – if you are a child in Somalia right now, what does your future hold? What is day to day life like?
DAYIB: It’s very bleak. If I speak about a child in Somalia who wakes up and might be in an internally displaced camp, this is a child who sees violence because majority of the women and children also get raped. They, you know, experience attacks by al-Shabab. And of the 12 million Somalis that I spoke about, 75 percent are under the age of 30. Of that, 68 percent are unemployed. That’s why they end up either joining piracy or joining al-Shabab, or going on to migrate and dying on their way to the West.
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