Trust

Trust is often treated as a cultural value. Across Somali business and diaspora networks, it also performs economic work.

It helps people verify partners, extend credit, coordinate trade, settle transactions, enforce expectations and keep commerce moving across distance. But trust has limits too. It can exclude outsiders, concentrate power, spread reputational harm and leave weaker participants without reliable recourse.

In Trust: The Missing Infrastructure, Samme Bogad draws on documented Somali business cases, diaspora experience, Eastleigh commerce, long-distance trade, remittances, mobile money and emerging digital infrastructure to ask a larger question: what can these systems teach us about building more trustworthy markets?

The book introduces practical tools including the Trust Stack, Trust Radius, the Somali Trust Infrastructure Model and the Trust Infrastructure Audit. It shows how entrepreneurs, fintech builders, investors and policymakers can preserve what relational trust does well while strengthening verification, portability, consumer protection, interoperability and recourse.

The future is not trust without institutions. It is institutions worthy of trust.