Nova Institute of Technical Training and Research (NITTR) was founded in Mogadishu in June 2008. The context matters here. Somalia in the mid-2000s was a country where formal education had been disrupted for an entire generation, where the state had little capacity to run vocational programmes of its own, and where thousands of young people, especially those in and around Mogadishu, had no realistic path from adolescence into a paying trade. Families displaced by years of conflict were arriving in the city with almost nothing, and the informal economy that absorbed most of them rewarded practical skills, not diplomas. NITTR’s founders built the institute around that reality rather than around an imported curriculum that assumed a functioning school system behind it.
The early years were modest by design. NITTR started as what its own records describe as an artisan training operation: a handful of workshops teaching trades like carpentry, tailoring and basic mechanics to whoever showed up ready to work. There was no ambition yet to call itself a research institute or to run programmes across multiple regions. The priority was narrower and more urgent, getting people into a trade fast enough that they could start earning before their savings or their patience ran out.
That changed gradually as the institute’s reputation grew and as international and diaspora-funded organisations began looking for local partners who could actually deliver training on the ground rather than manage it from a distance. Through the 2010s, NITTR’s course list expanded well beyond its original artisan trades to include electrical work, plumbing, welding, ICT, agriculture and eventually fisheries. Each addition tended to follow the same pattern: a partner organisation or a community identified a gap, NITTR built a course around it, and if the course proved useful, it stayed in the permanent portfolio. The fisheries training that now anchors several of NITTR’s coastal programmes, for instance, grew directly out of project work in Warsheikh, Marka and Adale, rather than being planned centrally in advance.
By the time NITTR marked its first decade of operation, in 2018, it had moved from a single-site artisan workshop into an institute running structured programmes across southern and central Somalia, working with partners like USAID, CARE, the Danish Refugee Council, COOPi and members of the Somali diaspora. That decade also brought the shift in identity reflected in the institute’s current name: training remained the core activity, but “research” was added deliberately, to signal that NITTR wanted to keep testing and adjusting its own methods rather than treating its curriculum as fixed.
The eighteen years since founding have not been a straight line of growth. Funding for individual projects has come and gone, some course areas have been scaled up and others scaled back depending on demand, and the institute has had to keep re-reading the labour market rather than assuming it already understood it. What has stayed consistent is the underlying premise the founders started with in 2008: that a person’s chances improve fastest when they are handed a skill they can use immediately, in a workshop with real tools, rather than a certificate that promises something a classroom alone cannot deliver.