In 2025 LAW trained ten Community Champions to run legal information sessions across the six Mogadishu IDP camps, reaching more than 6,400 people with information on legal avenues for gender based violence and on referral pathways to psychosocial support. Two Somali lawyers recruited and trained by LAW provided legal assistance and representation to 80 survivors, and the year produced 17 positive decisions in which perpetrators of sexual violence were convicted and survivors awarded compensation.

From 2014, LAW worked with the Ministry of Women and Human Rights Development to draft Somalia’s first Sexual Offences Bill, passed by Cabinet in 2018, whose adoption by Parliament has remained the UN Secretary-General’s primary recommendation for Somalia every year since. LAW established an Independent Complaints Mechanism and a Civilian Oversight Board so that violations could be reported through safe and trusted channels, and continues to lobby the Federal Parliament’s Human Rights Committee on gaps in protection.

LAW’s community champions model turns survivors into advocates: a network of Somali women who share information, support others to come forward and press for change within their own communities. LAW is also exploring legal and advocacy routes to end female genital mutilation, including potential public interest litigation before the African Committee on the Rights and Welfare of the Child following Somalia’s accession to the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child.

Children in displacement camps are among those most at risk of sexual violence in Somalia, and increasingly this includes boys. LAW has secured convictions in cases brought on behalf of child victims, and its 2025 caseload included 28 girls and four boys among the survivors represented. LAW has also become a leading voice in characterising female genital mutilation as a form of torture and, in some circumstances, an international crime.