Somalian Universities will Boost Swahili Language Education

Swahili (also known as Kiswahili) is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world and the official language of the East African Community (EAC). This week, at an EAC summit, the president of Somalia announced that his country would be increasing the level of Swahili education to encourage Somalia’s integration into the EAC. Here’s how the East African country plans to improve its Swahili curriculum in schools and universities.

Closer ties with East Africa

Last year, Somalia joined the EAC, a bloc of eight East African countries that also includes Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda. The EAC works to unify the region through cooperative trade, investment, and development, and it uses Swahili as its official language.

As part of Somalia’s integration into the Bloc, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud announced during the 2025 East African Cooperation and Economic Integration Conference (EACON 2025) that the country would increase teaching of Swahili alongside Somali, Arabic, and English in its schools and universities. President Mohamud said that “adopting Swahili is important for our integration into the [East African] region.”

Emphasizing the role of universities

President Mohamud has indicated that Swahili education will be increased across the country’s entire education sector, with a focus on the university sector. “The Somali National University, along with all Somali universities, must take the lead in promoting Swahili,” he said during the summit.

Somalia’s Education Minister Farah Sheikh Abdulkadir wants to see “Swahili become the language of communication, trade, and learning,” and is working with the East African Universities Association and the East African Qualifications Framework to develop a curriculum and implementation plan for teaching Swahili in Somalia.

Universities will play a significant role in accelerating Somalia’s integration of Swahili as a working and instructional language. The plan will begin with increased teacher training and curriculum development in Swahili. The Somali government hopes that promoting Swahili as a primary language in Somalia will allow the country to have closer ties with other EAC countries.

What’s next?

Swahili is already spoken by more than 200 million people, with the majority of speakers in East Africa. Some dialects of Swahili are already used in some parts of Somalia, but English, Somali, and Arabic remain the most widely spoken languages. Until recently, Arabic was used in primary schools as the language of instruction, while English remains the teaching language for most secondary and higher education instruction.

Switching to Swahili in primary, secondary, and tertiary education will require educating teachers in the Swahili language, as well as developing a curriculum and translating teaching materials.

Somalia’s push for wider adoption of Swahili is part of a growing Pan-African movement to make Swahili the lingua franca of the African continent. The language was first promoted as a unifying factor by Tanzania’s first president, Julius Nyerere, in the 1960s.

Swahili has been the official working language of the African Union since 2004. It replaced English as the language of instruction in Tanzania in 2017, and it has been introduced as a teaching language in several other African countries, including South Africa, Botswana, and Ethiopia. It's also possible to study Swahili and other African languages outside of Africa.