Somalia has horses. It has riders, breeders, and a mounted history that shaped a century of the country's politics. What it does not have — and has never had — is an institution charged with keeping the record, setting the rules, and protecting the animals at the centre of it.
That absence is not a small administrative gap. It is the reason a Somali horse cannot be registered anywhere, why no fixture run in the country can be recognised internationally, why breeding decisions are made without pedigree, and why the knowledge held by an ageing generation of horsemen is being lost at the rate that generation is being lost. The Somali Racing & Equestrian Club exists to close that gap, and to do it once, properly, in a form that can outlive everyone involved in founding it.
We chose Hudun because the plateau is the right ground and the community there was willing to make the founding site available. The land was acquired by purchase and the transfer was recorded in community assembly. That transaction, and the consent behind it, is the most valuable thing this project owns — more valuable than any building we will later put on it.
On the long view
We are not trying to stage an event. We are trying to establish a body that in twenty-five years is unremarkable: a national racing authority with a functioning studbook, licensed officials, an academy producing its own jockeys, farriers and stewards, a museum holding a properly catalogued heritage collection, and a calendar that regional and international authorities recognise without needing an explanation. The measure of success is that by then, nobody finds any of this surprising.
On transparency
Institutions in new jurisdictions are asked, correctly, to prove more than established ones. We have tried to design this website around that standard rather than around persuasion. Where something is complete, we mark it complete. Where it is planned, we mark it planned. Where we have no partner, no board appointment, and no title deed yet, we say so plainly rather than dress the gap in photography. A partner who discovers the gaps themselves has already stopped trusting us.
On heritage
The horse in Somali life was never only livestock. It carried standing, mobility, and, during the Dervish period, the movement itself. That history sits mostly in oral form, held by people, and it is perishable. Preserving it — recording testimony, cataloguing craft, commissioning honest historical work, building somewhere to put it — is not an ornament attached to a sporting project. It is half the reason the sporting project deserves to exist.
On partnership
We are approaching racing authorities, breeding bodies, welfare institutions, philanthropic funders and the Somali diaspora — not for endorsement, but for the specific things each can give: technical standards, veterinary capability, training places, archival expertise, and capital governed under published terms. We would rather have four partners who read the dossier closely than forty who liked the idea.
If you are reading this from a ministry, a fund, a federation or a family office: the record is published, the gaps are marked, and the conversation can start wherever you would like it to.
Issued on behalf of the founding initiative
Somali Racing & Equestrian Club
founded by Milgo Foundation
Signatory to be named on completion of registration. Until then this letter is issued institutionally rather than personally — we are not willing to attach a name to a role that has not yet been formally constituted.
info@somaliequestrian.org
