Digital Governance Builds Citizen Trust in War-Scarred Mogadishu, Study Finds

In a city that has spent more than three decades rebuilding from civil war, a new study suggests that something as simple as a municipal website or an online feedback form may help mend the broken bond between citizens and their government. Research conducted in Mogadishu, Somalia, has found that electronic participation—the use of digital tools to share information, gather opinions, and involve residents in decision-making—is positively and significantly associated with public trust in local government. The findings, published in the journal Discover Sustainability, offer rare empirical evidence from one of the world’s most fragile urban settings, where institutional trust is often the scarcest resource of all.

The study, carried out by Ahmed Mohamed Hassan of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Ahmed-Nor Mohamed Abdi of the Department of Public Administration, both at SIMAD University in Mogadishu, set out to answer a question that has long puzzled governance researchers: can digital participation mechanisms actually build trust in a post-conflict state, or are such tools meaningful only in countries where democratic institutions already function? Somalia, emerging from prolonged conflict with weak formal institutions and a rapidly growing digital culture driven by mobile technology, provided an unusually demanding test case.

To investigate, the researchers surveyed 301 residents of the Mogadishu municipality using a cross-sectional design. Rather than treating e-participation as a single undifferentiated concept, the study broke it down into three distinct dimensions drawn from the established e-governance literature. The first, e-information, covers the extent to which local government uses digital channels to publish data, announce decisions, and make its activities visible to the public. The second, e-consultation, refers to structured online mechanisms through which citizens can voice opinions, respond to proposals, and offer feedback before decisions are finalized. The third and most demanding dimension, e-decision-making, involves giving citizens genuine digital pathways to influence or co-determine municipal outcomes, moving beyond consultation toward shared authority.

The analytical backbone of the study was partial least squares structural equation modeling, or PLS-SEM, a statistical technique widely used in information systems and public administration research when relationships between latent constructs—such as trust or digital literacy—must be estimated from survey indicators. PLS-SEM is particularly suited to exploratory models in novel contexts because it does not require the strict distributional assumptions of covariance-based methods and performs well with complex predictive models. The researchers used it to test a conceptual model in which the three e-participation dimensions were hypothesized to have direct positive effects on trust in local government, while citizens’ digital literacy was modeled as a potential moderator of those relationships.

The results were striking in their consistency. All three dimensions of e-participation—e-information, e-consultation, and e-decision-making—showed positive and statistically significant direct associations with public trust in the municipal government. In other words, residents who perceived that Mogadishu’s local authorities were transparently sharing information online, actively soliciting citizen input through digital channels, and incorporating public participation into decision-making reported markedly higher levels of trust. This pattern held across the full model, suggesting that the trust-building pathway operates through multiple complementary mechanisms rather than a single channel.

The theoretical logic behind these associations draws on well-established ideas in governance research. Transparency, delivered through e-information, reduces the information asymmetries that breed suspicion in fragile states where rumors and misinformation often fill the vacuum left by unreliable official communication. E-consultation signals responsiveness and respect for citizen voice, which procedural fairness theories identify as a key driver of institutional legitimacy. E-decision-making goes further, transforming residents from passive recipients of governance into stakeholders with a measurable stake in municipal outcomes. In Mogadishu, where generations of residents have experienced government as either absent or predatory, even modest evidence of responsiveness may carry outsized psychological weight.

The study’s second major hypothesis, however, did not survive testing. The researchers expected that citizens’ digital literacy would moderate—either amplify or attenuate—the relationship between e-participation and trust, on the plausible reasoning that digitally skilled residents would be better positioned to access, interpret, and benefit from online participation platforms. Instead, digital literacy showed no statistically significant moderating effect. Within this sample, the trust-building benefits of e-participation remained consistent regardless of how digitally proficient respondents were. The authors are careful to interpret this null result with caution: their sample was predominantly digitally literate and well educated, which compresses the variation in digital skills and makes it statistically harder to detect moderation. In a more heterogeneous population, digital literacy might still act as a gatekeeper determining who can participate at all.

That caveat matters less than it might appear, however, because of what the sample itself reveals about urban Somalia. The image of Mogadishu as a technological wasteland is increasingly outdated. Mobile money, social media, and smartphone connectivity have spread rapidly across the city, and the study’s respondents—a group skewed toward digitally capable, educated residents—reflect a real and growing segment of the urban population. For this constituency, low-barrier digital platforms appear to function as genuine bridges to the state. The study describes how inclusive digital platforms can transform marginalized urban residents into active stakeholders, a shift that carries implications well beyond satisfaction with municipal services.

The findings are framed explicitly within the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 16, which calls for effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions, and its Target 16.7, which emphasizes responsive, inclusive, participatory, and representative decision-making at all levels. The authors argue that their results advance the literature on social sustainability by demonstrating how citizen-centric digital governance can be localized in post-conflict settings. They also connect the work to SDG 11 on sustainable cities, suggesting that digital participation contributes to institutional resilience and social cohesion in cities recovering from violence. In fragile states, where trust in government is both hardest to earn and most consequential for stability, e-participation may thus serve as a low-cost instrument of state-building.

The broader significance of the study lies less in its individual statistical estimates than in the territory it opens up. Most empirical work on e-participation and trust has been conducted in stable democracies with mature digital infrastructure, leaving scholars with little evidence about whether digital governance mechanisms transfer to environments marked by institutional fragility, security constraints, and histories of state failure. By extending the e-participation and public trust literature to an understudied post-war African urban governance setting, and by grounding it in a validated structural model, the research provides a template for future studies in comparable contexts—from other Somali cities to fragile urban centers across the Horn of Africa and beyond. The study received ethical approval from the Ethics Committee of the Center for Research and Development at SIMAD University and was funded through a SIMAD University research grant. Its central message is deceptively simple: even in the most difficult governance environments on Earth, the deliberate design of transparent, participatory digital platforms is statistically associated with something fragile states desperately need—citizens who believe their government can be trusted.

Subject of Research: The relationship between e-participation, digital literacy, and public trust in local government in post-conflict Mogadishu, Somalia

Article Title: Electronic participation, digital literacy and public trust in local government in the fragile context of Mogadishu, Somalia

Article References: Electronic participation, digital literacy and public trust in local government in the fragile context of Mogadishu, Somalia. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-05045-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-05045-0

Keywords: e-participation, public trust, digital literacy, local government, e-governance, Mogadishu, Somalia, post-conflict governance, PLS-SEM, SDG 16, participatory governance, social sustainability