Welcome to Baylawi

My name is Abshir Ahmed. The name Baylawi, my nickname, honors my ancestral roots in Somalia's Bander Bayla District, Bari Region.

I wear many hats: I am a father of three daughters, a social entrepreneur, a former refugee, and a long-time humanitarian. After 16 years working across emergency, protracted, and development contexts on three continents, I have shifted my professional focus towards climate change adaptation, smallholder agriculture, and responsible markets. While my career has evolved, the knowledge, ethics, and human-centered lens shaped by my humanitarian years remain central to how I see the world and approach my work.

As a Somali immigrant living in Europe, raising a family across cultures, and running a business whose work spans East and West Africa, with clients and partners stretching from Canada to Auckland, this space gives me somewhere to explore the intersections of work, identity, experience, and the issues I continue to care about.

What You Will Find Here

My writing is organized across three main themes:

• Data for Impact

  Here, I write about digital public goods (DPGs), digital public infrastructure (DPI), and the data systems needed for sustainable agriculture and more transparent markets. I explore how to structure data to measure meaningful impact, operationalize human rights standards in the field, and use traceability to serve not only regulators and companies but also farmers, producer organizations, and consumers.

  I am particularly interested in what remains behind after data has been collected: whether farmers and cooperatives gain useful infrastructure of their own, whether climate adaptation finance and social protection can be connected more directly to production realities, and whether consumers can better understand where the coffee they drink or the chocolate they enjoy actually comes from.

• Maandeeq Stories

  Maandeeq is where I write reflections on identity, culture, migration, belonging, and life as an ethnic Somali, Arabic-speaking Muslim living in Europe. These identities and communities are often written about from the outside; here, I write from the inside out, drawing on my experiences, family stories, friendships, and observations from different places and stages of life. I also occasionally write about books that stayed with me, a film or two, and the lasting impressions left by cities I once called home or places I have traveled through.

  Some pieces are meant to provoke discussion or create connections. Others are simply reflections, sometimes raw, that began as thoughts I wanted to give more room than conventional social media allows.

• Field Notes

  A candid look back at more than 15 years in the humanitarian and development sectors. I share experiences from emergency and protracted settings, lessons learned, practices that worked, institutional shortcomings, and reflections on a sector that shaped both my professional and personal life.

  I also write about contemporary humanitarian questions: what it means to be a refugee, how refugeehood differs from migration, how institutions respond to displacement, and how humanitarian principles translate, or sometimes fail to translate, into practice.

The Bigger Picture

Beyond these pages, my social entrepreneurship work is anchored in Terraxis SRL, a public-benefit company working at the intersection of agricultural trade, technology, sustainability, and human rights.

The subjects on Baylawi may appear varied, but they reflect the different worlds I have inhabited and continue to move between: humanitarian action and entrepreneurship, Africa and Europe, displacement and belonging, parenting, technology and the realities of smallholder production.

Whether you are here to explore agricultural data and climate adaptation, reflect on humanitarian practice, understand something about migration and identity, or read a perspective different from your own, you are welcome.

At 41, having lived on three continents and across several distinct regions, Substack feels like a fairly natural place for those conversations. Everything here is free to read. I invite you to engage, disagree, debate, share your own experience, and, where you can, teach me something too.

I would rather this be a conversation than a one-way publication.

Thank you for being here.