One thing I learned from Somaliland, where people began building peace in the 1990s after years of terrible conflict, is that absence can be a good thing. Let me explain….

Hargeisa had very few telephones, because it had very few telephone poles. And it had very few telephone poles because Somalia’s former dictator Said-Barre wanted to both punish people who lived in Somaliland and make communication difficult for them.

So early on, after Somaliland decided to take back its independence from Somalia and become its own state once again, a huge amount of ingenuity sprouted there. And they began to create a virtual infrastructure – mobile phones rather than telephone poles.