My Graduation Ceremony

Whatever I write today will not be enough to convey my real emotions. I apologize in advance anyone who I forget to mention.

Mentoring Japanese High Schoolers

Whenever I visit high schools in Japan, Japanese kids don’t stop to impress me. Their quality is just too high considering their age. My experiences with them always contribute to my vision of the kind of education I want Somali kids to have and the way I want them to learn.

You Have a New Business Idea? What’s Next? – Learn the Learning Launch Tool

What do you do if you have a business idea and want to test its attractiveness and practicality in the real marketplace? Maybe you start writing a business plan, look for funding sources, and launch your new business, right? Hell, NO! That’s the traditional and the riskiest way of starting a business. It’s also a waste of time, as many new entrepreneurs have experienced. It’s, as Professor Ed Hesse said, a “complete idiocy”.

A Graduation in Somalia is More Than a Graduation

For the majority of students around the world (mainly in the developed world), they go to university, finish it, and proceed to the next stage of their life. That’s how predictable their life is. But the case of Somalia is totally different, esp. those students who happened to be students between 2006 and 2013. Abdirashid Ibrahim Hassan is one example of those students who paid the price for something he himself cannot even explain as of today.
In 2013, during a semester break, Abdirashid became a victim of a blast in Mogadishu after a bomb planted in their car exploded. At the time, I was the secretary of his faculty and also one of his Semester I teachers. He’s a brilliant student, the kind of student every teacher wants to have in his/her class.

A Day at the Industrial Innovation City of Japan-Kitakyushu

 

If you really want to see how a country can start from NOTHING and go on to become a leader in a certain industry - in this case, the steel industry, please pay a visit to Japan, esp. Kitakyushu city, a city that hosts Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corporation Yawata Works. Japan was 100 years behind the European countries in industrialization, but within 15 years, the country was on bar with the West. What makes this success an astonishing feat is that Japan didn't have the resources required to feed the steel industry. For Japan, the know-how, not natural resources, was/is a secret to compete.

What You Need to Know to Buy a Car from Japan: Information for African Consumers

Because of the current economic situation in Africa, majority of African consumers prefer to buy used cars; and if it is from Japan, they don’t take more time to check its quality because they associate Japan with quality. But Africa is price sensitive. VERY SENSITIVE. You can ask Chinese companies.

But there is no direct connection between African consumers and Japanese car dealers; rather there are country representatives that connect them (and maybe increase the prices). The reason is that African consumers don’t know where and who to contact: the know-how is missing here. Therefore, this piece will help African consumers with that information; hence, save money for them. We’ll use Somalia as an example to explain the supply chain process in lay terms.

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Fukuzawa Yukichi: The Great Japanese Intellectual

We're attending a 5-days workshop co-organized by National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) for JICA long-term and JDS participants. The aim is to give the participants an opportunity to deeply understand the Japanese development experience, and then to draw lessons and insights that will help them in the development of their respective countries. In my case, the possibility of contributing to the development of Somalia by understanding the experience of how Japan has developed.