28 October 2026
Ahead of the THE Awards on 26 November, our Partners have been speaking with those shortlisted for the AQ-sponsored awards, hearing the stories behind their submissions and learning more about the people, ideas and achievements making a real difference across higher education. It’s been a great opportunity to hear directly about their work and share the impact they’re having across the sector.
In this interview, Claire Lauder spoke to Professor Andrew Leather, Professor of Global Health and Surgery at King’s College London and founding director of KGHP, and Hamda Ali Abdillahi, KGHP’s Somaliland Country Coordinator, about their shortlisted submission for International Collaboration of the Year.
A friendship that began in London in the 1990s has developed into a 26-year partnership between King’s College London and Somaliland. Building on this longstanding relationship, King’s Global Health Partnerships (KGHP) supported Somaliland’s Ministry of Health Development between 2023 and 2025 through a national programme to improve the quality of healthcare.
Working across five African countries, KGHP helped strengthen healthcare provision in Somaliland, with the programme aiming to improve the quality of care for 4.2 million people. This work forms the basis of the partnership’s shortlisted submission for this year’s THE Awards.
A partnership that started with a friendship
The story begins not in a boardroom but in a London neighbourhood. In 1992, Andrew’s wife began befriending Somali refugee families; one of them included a doctor who had fled Somaliland’s civil war between 1988 and 1991, and he and Andrew became good friends.
“He invited me to visit Somaliland in the year 2000,” Andrew explains. “At that time, the health sector was quite run down and destroyed by the conflict. That visit was the beginning of what became a 26-year partnership.”
The first request was modest: support one maternity hospital as it opened its doors for the first time. Clinicians from King’s answered the call, and over the following years the focus moved with the needs of local partners, including a long period supporting the young universities that had emerged after the war with midwifery, nursing and medical education.
From access to quality
Around three years ago, the Ministry of Health Development, along with the universities and hospitals KGHP works with, recognised that the health system needed a stronger focus on quality, and the global health community was saying the same thing; in low- and middle-income countries, poor-quality care causes around five million deaths a year, more than the 3.6 million caused by lack of access.
“It’s not all about access into health facilities. Quality is important,” says Andrew. Between 2023 and 2025, the entire focus of the partnership shifted to improving quality across the health system. When the programme began, Somaliland had no national framework for quality within its health system. The partners set out to strengthen quality at three levels: national policy, regional hospitals and medical education.
Led by the Ministry, built on trust
The programme brought together King’s, the Ministry, the World Health Organisation, Qatar Charity, Global Health Partnerships (formerly THET) and academics at Harvard University. Andrew is clear about who was in charge: “The Ministry wanted this.”
That ownership rested on decades of trust – Senior Ministry leaders believed in the partnership, and dedicated staff were in touch with the King’s team weekly, sometimes daily. Short visits from London were backed by “an awful lot of virtual linking”, and by Hamda on the ground. Hamda sums up how the roles were divided: the Ministry set the priorities, hospitals drove implementation, universities built knowledge and capacity, and KGHP provided technical expertise and shared learning.
Asking the people: 2,500 voices
The most distinctive part of the programme was a first for Somaliland: public opinion directly shaping national health policy. Working with Harvard academics through the QuEST network’s People’s Voice Survey, the team asked 2,500 people about their experience of healthcare and their confidence in the system.
The survey is normally run by telephone, but that would have missed some of the people who matter most. “We wanted to reach nomadic pastoralists, people herding camels in the most remote areas,” says Andrew. “So we went out to those remote villages and spoke to people individually.” The questions were adapted to the Somaliland context while staying close enough to the original method for the results to be compared with other countries.
Some findings surprised the team:
That last finding is now “part of the DNA” of Somaliland’s health policy, which defines quality around reaching urban, rural and nomadic communities alike.
For Hamda, the survey changed whose voice counted. “The strategy was informed not only by what the health system told people they needed, but also by what people themselves told us they needed,” she says. “This has strengthened local ownership and made the strategy more responsive to the population.” The result is Somaliland’s first five-year national quality of care policy and strategy.
Safer hospitals and a stronger workforce
In Somaliland’s six regional hospitals, the focus was infection prevention and control. Staff were trained in WHO tools “which we were not using before”, says Hamda, and every hospital now has a Patient Safety and Infection Prevention and Control Committee. The programme also introduced digital quality monitoring and, with philanthropic support, bought essential equipment such as sterilising machines.
The programme also looked further upstream, at the people who will staff the health system. Medical schools have “sprung up all over the place” since the war, Andrew explains, and quality has varied widely. An earlier KGHP project developed a national harmonised medical curriculum. At the start of this programme, only one university was beginning to use it. Through continued support, more universities are now taking it seriously and putting it into practice.
“It means there’ll be more uniform medical education, much more tailored to the Somaliland context,” says Andrew. “We’re more likely to get quality graduates coming out of the system, which was not there before.”
What other universities can learn
Andrew argues that universities have a third role alongside education and research: serving society through practical engagement. “It’s taking the evidence and, with academic rigour, helping to put that evidence into practice with our partners,” he says. Work like strengthening ministries and hospital infection control has traditionally been left to international NGOs. KGHP does it from within a university, which Andrew describes as “stretching the traditional boundaries of what a university should be doing”.
His second lesson is about equity. “We try, as much as possible, to have equitable partnerships, to share power, and to learn from each other,” he says. “It’s not all about North to South.”
That learning flows back to London too, where King’s global health students are taught by people doing the work. And Andrew sees a bigger point: “We live in an increasingly polarised world. This is partnership. This is global citizenship. This is connecting parts of the world that would not easily connect.”
A legacy that stays in Somaliland
For Hamda, the clearest measure of success is what remains when the programme ends.
“The most important achievement is not simply what we delivered during the programme,” she says. “It’s the systems, skills and local leadership that remain in place. International collaboration helped make this change possible, but Somaliland institutions learned the process and will sustain it. For me, that is the real value of a successful partnership.”
We’re looking forward to celebrating the achievements and successes of higher education institutions across all the awards next month, and recognising the fantastic work taking place across the sector. To see the full shortlist of the THE Awards, visit their website at https://the-awards.co.uk/2026/en/page/shortlist.
