Maternity & obstetric care
Safe deliveries, prenatal and postnatal care, and emergency obstetric intervention: the founding purpose of the hospital, still its daily work.
Hargeisa, Somaliland
A hospital that teaches. A teaching that heals.
For over two decades, Edna Adan University Hospital has delivered care and trained the health workers who carry it forward, built on one conviction: that Somaliland's future is safest in the hands of its own doctors, nurses, and midwives.
10,000+
Babies delivered at the hospital
4,000+
Nurses, midwives & health workers trained
1st
Fistula repair & hydrocephalus shunt surgery in Somaliland
1,000
Midwives, the hospital's national training goal
The founder's mission
Edna Adan Ismail, former WHO official and First Lady of Somaliland, built this hospital from her own savings and a lifelong refusal to accept the maternal death toll she had witnessed as a nurse and midwife. Her mission was never care alone: it was to train the people who would carry that care forward long after her.
That mission remains the hospital's founding text: to educate fully qualified healthcare professionals, to combat female genital mutilation, and to train 1,000 midwives across Somaliland, a promise the hospital keeps one graduating class at a time.
Construction began in 1998 on a 9,600-square-metre site that had previously been a garbage dump; the hospital became functional on March 9, 2002. Edna Adan Ismail, who also served as Somaliland's Foreign Minister, has continued to live on the hospital grounds she built.
Care & services
69 beds of general and specialist medicine, delivered by a resident and visiting faculty of doctors, surgeons, and allied health professionals. Direct Relief has recognized the hospital as Somaliland's premier referral center for obstetric emergencies.
General medicine
Everyday illness and injury treated by resident physicians, from routine care to trauma once turned away for lack of anywhere else to go.
Surgical services
Home to Somaliland's first obstetric fistula repairs and first hydrocephalus shunt surgery. Visiting international surgical teams regularly treat cleft palate, clubfoot, spina bifida, and burn contractures.
Emergency services
The hospital's doors do not close. Emergency and trauma care is available around the clock for the communities of Hargeisa and beyond.
Life at the hospital
Real moments from the wards and operating rooms of Edna Adan University Hospital.
A university, before it is anything else
Every ward here is also a classroom. Edna Adan University Hospital trains nursing, midwifery, laboratory technology, pharmacy, anesthesiology, dentistry, and public health students under the direct supervision of practicing clinicians, on the belief that Somaliland's healthcare future has to be trained at home, not imported.
Visiting international specialists don't just operate here: they teach here, passing surgical technique to residents in the same rooms where patients are treated.
Clinical
- Nursing
- Midwifery
- Anesthesiology
Allied Health
- Laboratory Technology
- Pharmacy
- Dentistry
Community
- Public Health
Recognized beyond Somaliland
Working in partnership with
- Somaliland Ministry of Health
- UNICEF
- World Health Organization
- Edna Adan University
Support our mission
Every gift trains another midwife and keeps a delivery room supplied. See the ways to give, including the Edna Adan Foundation and Friends of Edna's.
Visit & contact
Edna Adan University Hospital
Hargeisa, Somaliland
Emergency line staffed 24 hours a day.