Edna Adan Biography

Edna Adan is the director and founder of Hargeisa's Edna Adan Maternity Hospital. She is the head of the Organization for Victims of Torture, as well as an activist and pioneer in the fight to end female circumcision. She formerly served as Somaliland's Foreign Minister and First Lady. Adan was born in Hargeisa, the daughter of a well-known Somali medical practitioner. Somaliland's first girls' school opened when she was 15 years old. She went to work as a student-teacher there and got private instruction. She was allowed to take examinations in a different room from the males, and she was the first Somali female to be given one of a handful coveted scholarships to study in Britain. Adan studied nursing, midwifery, and hospital administration for seven years. When she returned to Somaliland, she became the country's first certified nurse-midwife and the first Somali woman to drive a car. Adan began her goal of constructing a hospital in Somalia in the mid-1980s, but was forced to flee when the Somali Civil War broke out. She was then recruited to work for the World Health Organization (WHO), where she held many significant roles pushing for the elimination of harmful traditional practices including female genital cutting. She was also in charge of educating midwives and traditional birth attendants in the WHO's Eastern Mediterranean region's 22 nations. From 1991 until 1997, she served as WHO's representative in Djibouti. When Adan returned to Somaliland, she sold all she owned in order to pursue her goal of building her own hospital. Since the civil war, the sole suitable place in Hargeisa for the hospital has been utilized as a rubbish dump. The project hit another snag when funding ran out and the facility still lacked a roof. The hospital formally opened on March 9, 2002, thanks to the generosity of donors and businesses. Adan's hospital has a death rate that is one-quarter that of the national average, and she is trying to extend medical treatment to all of Somaliland. Adan was inducted into the University of Toledo's Medical Mission Hall of Fame. She has an honorary doctorate from Clark University in Massachusetts and has been named an honorary fellow at Cardiff University School of Nursing in Wales. She appears in the famous PBS documentary Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, which was inspired by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's book of the same name.

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