Saturday April 16, 2016
By Conor Gaffey

If they are to be held in 2016, elections in Somalia will look nothing like what most Western observers are used to. According to theNLF’s communiquepublished on April 12, voting in Somalia will not follow the one-person, one-vote system utilized by the U.K. and the U.S. among others. Instead, there will be an electorate of just 13,750—Somalia’s total populationis10.5 million—for choosing the 275 members of the lower house of parliament. The electorate will largely be determined by 135 traditional elders, who hold positions of authority and function in political-judicial roles within their particular clans.

Somalia’s parliament is ostensibly bicameral, but the upper house has not yet been established. That is another task that must be completed before elections can take place and one that could hold particular challenges. The NLF communique states that 30 percent of seats be reserved for women in each member state (Somalia operates a federal system and is composed of 18 administrative regions). Such a lofty goal could prove difficult to achieve in a country ranked as thefifth most dangerous countryin which to be a woman in a 2011 Thomson Reuters Foundation poll.

"There’s a substantial amount of bureaucracy to take place beforehand,” says Ahmed Soliman, Somalia expert at international affairs thinktank Chatham House. "There’s still really no timeline for these processes to take place before the government’s mandate runs out, so there’s a lot of work to be done.”