Our People

Before Elman Peace was an organisation, it was one man's answer to a war. Elman Ali Ahmed trained as an electronic engineer in Italy and Germany, then came home to Mogadishu in 1988 to build something — he opened Elman Electronics, one of the city's first, and ran a vehicle repair and recovery business alongside it. When the war came, he turned that same instinct for building toward something harder: a technical training institute to rehabilitate young militia fighters.

In the early 1990s that work became Drop the Gun, Pick Up the Pen — offering young men fighting for the warlords a way out: a trade, an education, a reason to believe in a life beyond the front line. In 1992, he founded the Elman Football Club, fielding players from rival districts on the same team in a city where crossing the wrong line could get you killed.

As the war intensified, Elman and his wife, Fartuun Adan, made the hardest decision of their lives: she would take their daughters somewhere safe; he would stay to keep the work going. It was the last time they saw him alive.

On March 9, 1996, Elman Ali Ahmed was shot and killed by unidentified gunmen near the family's home in southern Mogadishu. He was 42. Amnesty International condemned the killing as an execution-style murder carried out “on account of his peaceful opinions and his peace activities.” His death was meant to end the work. It didn't. Drop the Gun, Pick Up the Pen became a national mantra — and the logic underneath it still runs through every reintegration pathway this organisation builds today.

In 2010, while Al-Shabaab still controlled Mogadishu, Ilwad returned from Canada to Somalia. She co-founded Sister Somalia and, in 2015, became the first civil society representative to brief the UN Security Council on the Protection of Civilians.

In 2012 she started the organisation's first girls' basketball programme, after noticing that some of the young women coming through Sister Somalia needed a way to heal that didn't require talking about what had happened to them.

Alongside her mother, she has helped grow the organisation's work into climate, gender justice, human rights, and economic empowerment, while continuing the core work in disarmament, mental health, and youth skills training. She has spent fifteen years building alongside the woman who taught her how. Not instead of her. Alongside her.