This Occasional Paper distills and adapts findings from a longer Policy Design Solution Paper on Public Financial Management (PFM) in Adado District, Galmudug State. While the original design paper provides a detailed account of research findings, design propositions, and implementation blueprints, this paper extracts the core analytical and practical insights and presents them in a concise, decision-oriented format for policymakers and practitioners.

The aim of this brief is threefold. First, it clearly articulates one of the public finance problems in Adado, situating it within Somalia’s broader challenges of fiscal decentralization, legitimacy, and service delivery. Second, it explains the method used by the SPA Policy Lab—specifically Local Strategies Research (LSR), combined with evidence-based policy design—and why this approach is particularly suited to fragile, post-conflict, and religiously informed governance contexts. Third, it reflects on how this co-design approach can be applied to other policy themes beyond taxation, offering lessons for Somali policymakers, civil servants, civil society actors, and development partners.

At its core, this paper argues that one of Adado’s fundamental fiscal challenges is social, moral, and relational. As such, these challenges cannot be solved solely through conventional technocratic reforms. Instead, sustainable solutions require co-designing fiscal governance with communities, engaging local moral authorities, and anchoring public finance in shared meanings of legitimacy, responsibility, and public welfare (maslaxadda caamka).